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YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH 

ALBERT S. COOK, Editor 
LVII 



±L 



A^7 1 



WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF 
POETIC DICTION 

A STUDY OF THE HISTORICAL AND PERSONAL 
BACKGROUND OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS 



MARJORIE LATTA BARSTOW 

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN CONNECTICUT COLLEGE 




NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCC^VII 

' 7 ^ 



YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH 

ALBERT S. COOK, Editor 
LVII 



WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF 
POETIC DICTION 

A STUDY OF THE HISTORICAL AND PERSONAL 
BACKGROUND OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS 



BY 

MARJORIE LATTA BARSTOW 

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN CONNECTICUT COLLEGE 



H 



A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School 

of Yale University, in Candidacy for the Degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy 




NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCCXVII 



a'^ 



1y 



^%Q^^ 



din 



PREFACE 

The following study was undertaken as a doctoral dis- 
sertation under the direction of Professor Albert S. Cook 
of Yale University. To Professor Cook I am especially 
indebted, not only for stimulating guidance in the field of 
the English language in general, but for a most minute and 
painstaking criticism of the proof. To Professor Lane 
Cooper of Cornell University I owe a debt less easy of 
definition. Although he has not read the manuscript of 
this book, and is not responsible for particular statements 
herein, the inspiration and the direction that I received 
from him in my reading of Wordsworth as an under- 
graduate at Cornell has been the most vital element in my 
study of the poet; if there is anything good in this work 
of mine, it is ultimately derived from him. I also wish to 
make grateful acknowledgment to Professor Charlton M. 
Lewis for criticism received from him in his course on 
nineteenth-century poets in the Graduate School of Yale 
University. 

My indebtedness to books I have tried to indicate in 
the footnotes. But, like many other students of Words- 
worth, I wish to record my especial appreciation of the 
Early Life of William Wordszvorth by Professor Emile 
Legouis. Although, in many instances, I have been forced 
to disagree with the conclusions of M. Legouis, I feel that 
without the stimulating example of his beautiful work, 
this study would have been impossible. In acknowledging 
my special indebtedness to books, I wish to make grateful 
mention of the beautiful collection of Wordsworthiana in 
the possession of Mrs. Cynthia Morgan St. John of Ithaca, 
New York, which she generously placed at my disposal. 



iv Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

In citing quotations from the prose of Coleridge and the 
poetry of Wordsworth, I have tried to retain the original 
punctuation and spelHng, because they represent the usage 
of the authors themselves. In most other cases it has seemed 
best to standardize the spelling and punctuation for the sake 
of greater clearness and smoothness of reading. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction ....... vii 

Chapter i. Poetic Diction in 'Our Elder Poets' . i 
Chapter 2. Poetic Diction in 'Modern Times' . 19 
Chapter 3. Wordsworth's Poetic Development Pre- 
vious to the Meeting with Coleridge ... 67 
Chapter 4. Coleridge and His Circle . . .113 
Chapter 5, Coleridge and Wordsworth . . 126 
Chapter 6. The Lyrical Ballads .... 141 

Bibliography ....... 183 

Index ........ 186 



INTRODUCTION 

To those who read the poetry of Wordsworth in the light 
of Matthew Arnold's criticism, with the enthusiasm of all 
good Wordsworthians, the poet is primarily a teacher, a 
philosopher, a pure soul with a message of healing for a 
feverish w^orld. So, indeed, he regarded himself. *I wish 
either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing,'^ he 
writes; and his wish has been fulfilled. But too often he 
is so considered to the exclusion of a proper interest in 
his merits as a stylist, as a great and peculiarly self-con- 
scious artist *in a kind absolutely unborrowed and his 
own.' 

To the two most finely gifted critics of his own genera- 
tion he presented himself in a quite different light. It was 
not Wordsworth's philosophy that primarily interested 
Coleridge and Lamb ; it was his style. To his philosophy 
they were both more or less antagonistic. Coleridge 
objected to the 'misty, rather than mystic, confusion of 
God with the world'^ in poems like Tintern Abbey, though 
at the same time he believed Wordsworth capable of writ- 
ing the first genuine philosophical poem in English. Lamb 
was inclined to make merry over Wordsworth's devotion 
to stocks and stones, and other inanimate objects, and to 
celebrate the superior attractions of the London streets.^ 
But both immediately gave full recognition and homage 
to Wordsworth's unique gift of imaginative expression — 
'the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, 
and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around 
forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common 
view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up 
the sparkle and the dew drops.'* 

'L. W.F. I. 331. 
' Biographia Epistolaris 2. 195. 
^Letters of Charles Lamb i. 190-191. 
'B. L. I. 59. 



VIU WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

This gift, they felt, expressed itself in a diction 'highly 
individualised and characteristic'^ — a 'diction peculiarly 
his own, ... a style which cannot be imitated, with- 
out its being at once recognised as originating in Mr. 
Wordsworth.'^ This style both Coleridge and Lamb 
believed they could distinguish without hesitation, wher- 
ever they encountered it. 'That 

"Uncertain heaven received 
Into the bosom of the steady lake" 

I should have recognised anywhere,' writes Coleridge,^ 
*and had I met these lines running wild in the deserts 
of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out, "Words- 
worth !" ' Lamb seems to hold a similar opinion. In 
his characteristic remarks on the edition of 1815, in 
which he proceeds from poem to poem, commenting 
with the refined Epicurean enjoyment of a connoisseur 
in language on the lines and phrases that most please 
his taste, he continually implies that Wordsworth has 
a distinct and recognizable manner. ' "Laodamia" is 
a very original poem,' he writes. 'I mean original 
with reference to your own manner. You have nothing 
like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly 
admired it, but not suspected its derivation.'* Again, in 
speaking of the extracts from An Evening Walk and the 
Descriptive Sketches included in the volumes of 181 5, he 
remarks^: 'All the rest of your poems are so much of a 
piece, they might have been written in the same v/eek; 
these decidedly speak of an earlier period. They tell more 
of what you had been reading.' 

'B.L.1.77. 

'B. L. I. 80. 

^Memoirs i. 139. 

* Letters of Charles Lamb i. 353. 

' Ibid. I. 354- 



INTRODUCTION IX 

This highly individuaHzed diction always tempted Cole- 
ridge's powers of analysis. Indeed he was first led to his 
speculation on the difference between imagination and 
fancy by his attempts to define the peculiar quality of 
Wordsworth's poetry, as distinguished from verse that 
might seem more brilliant or clever or obviously skilful.^ 
This analysis he carries further in his famous criticism of 
Wordsworth's style, and theory of style, in the Biographia 
Liter aria- 'Would any but a poet — at least could any one 
without being conscious tliat he had expressed himself with 
noticeable vivacity — ^have described a bird singing loud 
by, "The thrush is busy in the wood," or have spoken of 
boys with a string of club-moss round their rusty hats, as 
the boys ''with their green coronal f" — or have translated a 
beautiful May day into ''Both earth and sky keep jubilee" ? 
or have brought all the different marks and circumstances 
of a sea-loch before the mind, as the actions of a living and 
acting powder ? or have represented tlie reflection of the sky 
in the water, as ''That uncertain heaven received into the 
bosom of the steady lake?" Even the grammatical con- 
struction is not unfrequently peculiar; as "The wind, the 
tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic sky, might 
well be dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given 
etc." There is a peculiarity in the use of the acrvvapT-qrov 
(that is the omission of the connective particle before the 
last of several words, or several sentences used grammati- 
cally as single words, all being in the same case and govern- 
ing or being governed by the same verb) and not less in the 
'construction of words by apposition {"to him, a youth").' 

But Coleridge's brilliant and suggestive analysis of the 
characteristic features of Wordsv/orth's style — the unique 
and imaginative metaphors, the rich and often curiously 
felicitous diction, and the peculiar grammatical structure — 

^B. L. I. 60. 
' B. L. 2. 83-84. 



X Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

is, after all, rather fragmentary. Every remark is a seed- 
thought which needs development. Moreover, there is 
something exasperating and even misleading in the attitude 
that he chose to assume to the theory of diction which lies 
at the basis of the Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge, rather than 
Wordsworth, had been responsible for the critical propa- 
ganda^ which, as he says, was the real cause of Words- 
worth's unpopularity.^ The Preface that he does not 
understand was half a child of his own brain,^ written by 
Wordsworth to please him, and superintended and cor- 
rected by him.* Forgetting all this, he proceeds to adopt 
the hesitating manner of a stranger to statements that 
partly originated in his own fertile brain, and fails to supply 
the one invaluable thing that he only could supply — a more 
detailed account of the thoughtful and eager dialogues that 
were behind Wordsworth's somewhat inadequate utter- 
ances in print. Hence, though this criticism by Coleridge 
is the necessary starting-point for any investigation of 
Wordsworth's theory and practice, he was far from saying 
the last word on the subject. Wordsworth had more rea- 
sons than wounded vanity for his dissatisfaction with the 
remarks of his former collaborator. 

Despite the natural unwillingness of lesser men to enter 
into competition with Coleridge and Lamb, it is astonishing 

^ L. W. F. 3. 121, 152. 

'B.L. I. 50-53. 

^ 'Although Wordsworth's Preface is half a child of my own 
brain, and arose out of conversations so frequent that, with few 
exceptions, we could scarcely either of us, perhaps, positively say 
which first started any thought (I am speaking of the Preface 
as it stood in the second volume), yet I am far from going all 
lengths with Wordsworth.'— Letter to Southey, July 1802. {Letters 
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge i. 386.) Coleridge speaks as if the first 
consciousness of this difference in opinion were felt in 1802. — 
Letters i. 375. 

Mn Account of the Wordsworth and Coleridge MSS. in the 
Possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman, p. 19. 



INTRODUCTION XI 

that this analysis of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 
as illustrated in his style, so ably begun by them in the poet's 
own lifetime, should not have been carried on more sys- 
tematically by the many critics who have praised Words- 
worth so well. We find, indeed, a considerable number of 
scattered observations and brief studies of Wordsworth's 
style which are highly illuminating. For instance R. H. 
Button's little paper on Wordsworth's Two Styles is really 
discriminating. So also are Principal Shairp's delicate 
appreciation of the style of The White Doe of Rylstone, and 
Bagehot's essay on Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art. The 
various remarks of Hutchinson and Dowden — the accom- 
plished students of Wordsworth's text — in their editions of 
the whole or parts of his work are always valuable. More- 
over, the definitive text of Wordsworth's complete poems 
in the Oxford edition, and the Concordance of Professor 
Lane Cooper, have furnished the indispensable basis for a 
more scientific study of Wordsworth's poetic diction; and 
Professor JEmile Legouis has set a shining example in the 
detailed analysis of the Early Poems in The Early Life of 
William Wordsworth. But these more scholarly efforts, 
added to the brilliant comments of Wordsworth's innumer- 
able critics from Aubrey de Vere to Professor Harper, have 
been insufficient to dispel the popular misconceptions inher- 
ited from the reviewers. Wordsworth's readers to-day 
have more sympathy for his 'philosophy' than the Monthly 
Reviewer of 1815, but they hold much the same opinions 
concerning his style, and have scarcely more foundation for 
them. 

The principal reason for this neglect is that the world 
has never taken Wordsworth's so-called theory of poetic 
diction seriously. Having jumped to the conclusion that 
Wordsworth's practice was inconsistent with his principles, 
most of his readers have failed either to recognize the 
scholarly background of much that he has to say, or to 
perceive the real comprehensiveness of his complete ideal 



Xll WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

of expression. In point of fact, Wordsworth is not incon- 
sistent. His most dignified and elaborate style is incon- 
sistent only with a single clause of his definition of the 
proper language of poetry, when that is detached from its 
context and arbitrarily taken to represent the whole. 

The notion that poetry in general should employ the 
language of the 'lower andmiddle classes of society' was 
never Wordsworth's ideal at any time. It is only his defi- 
nition of an experiment^ that he chose to try in thirteen 
out of the nineteen poems by him in the first edition of the 
Lyrical Ballads; and the famous Preface is little more than 
a somewhat unwilling and frankly inadequate attempt to 
explain this same experiment.^ Wordsworth himself sug- 
gests that an exposition of the whole theory would involve 
a complete history of literature and a social psycholog}^^ 
After modifying his original suggestion until the 'language 
of conversation in the lower and middle classes of society' 
became, in 1800, *a selection of the real language of men 
in a state of vivid sensation,' and after softening this, in 
1802, by a further emphasis upon the selective power of 
the poet, Wordsworth finally merges his special ideal in a 

^ The majority of the following poems are to be considered as 
experiments.' Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, 1798. 

^ 'I was still more unwilling to undertake the task [of writing 
a systematic defense of the theory upon which the Lyrical Ballads 
were written] because adequately to display the opinions, and fully 
to enforce the arguments would require a space wholly dispro- 
portionate to the nature of a preface. ... I have therefore 
altogether declined to enter regularly upon this defense.' — Preface 
to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800. 

® 'For to treat the subject with the clearness and coherence, of 
which I believe it susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full 
account of the present state of public taste in this country, and to 
determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; vv^hich again 
could not be determined without pointing out in what manner 
language and the human mind act and react on each other, and 
without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone, but 
likewise of society itself.' — Ibid. 



INTRODUCTION Xlll 

general respect for the purity and integrity of the English 
language — a new and more vital interpretation of that 
correctness so cherished by the eighteenth century. In 
the first collected edition of his poems in 1815 (which 
included the Lyrical Ballads and the poems of 1807, with 
a few additions of later origin), he relegates his original 
preface to the Appendix as containing iittle of special 
appUcation to the greater part, perhaps, of the collection.'^ 
Why has Wordsworth's own strict limitation of his 'theory' 
to a few poems been so systematically ignored? 

But if tlie theory, in its more limited form, was merely 
an explanation of a small group of poems, much more was 
meant by it than commonly meets the eye of the casual 

^ The observations prefixed to that portion of these volumes 
which was published many years ago, under the title of "Lyrical Bal- 
lads," have so little of special application to the greater part, per- 
haps, of the collection as subsequently enlarged and diversified, that 
they could not with any propriety stand as an introduction to it. 
Not deeming it, hov/ever, expedient to suppress that exposition, 
slight and imperfect as it is, of the feelings which had determined 
the choice of subjects, and the principles which had regulated the 
composition of those Pieces, I have transferred it to the end of the 
second volume, to be attended to, or not, at the pleasure of the 
reader.' In all the complete editions between 1815 and 1845 this 
formed the first paragraph of the Preface which was reprinted from 
the volumes of 181 5, as an introduction to the continually increas- 
ing collection of Wordsworth's poems. When this preface was 
transferred to the Appendix in the edition of 1845, the paragraph 
just quoted was replaced by the following note: *In the succeeding 
editions, when the collection was much enlarged and diversified, 
this Preface [the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads] was transferred 
to the end of the volumes, as having little of special application to 
the contents.' In the reprints of the Preface of 181 5 by Grosart, 
Knight, George, and Nowell Smith, the last edition has naturally 
been followed ; and for this reason the important introductory para- 
graph is known only to those who have access to an early edition. 
When the critical edition of Wordsworth's literary criticism, which, 
despite the efforts of Nowell Smith, is still a desideratum, shall 
appear, it is to be hoped that so important an utterance will be 
restored. 



xiv Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

reader. It was not a single isolated utterance. It had the 
wide background of English poetry and criticism for two 
centuries, and the narrower background of some very ear- 
nest literary experiment and study on the part, not of 
Wordsworth alone, but of an entire group of writers who 
were publishing in that open-minded periodical. The 
Monthly Magazine. Chief among these were Coleridge and 
Lamb. Not till we realize what Coleridge brought with 
him from Lamb to those memorable conversations in which 
the Lyrical Ballads originated do we begin to understand 
what was behind the curt sentences of the Advertisement of 

1798. 

It is not in their casual appearances in print that the 
most vital critical reflections of Wordsworth and Coleridge 
are to be sought, but in that remarkable oral discussion, 
begun by them in their long walks among the Quantock 
Hills, and continued day after day and year after year, not 
only by them, but by a larger circle, which included at 
various times Lamb, Southey, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Scott, 
Landor, and others. 'I have never felt inclined to write 
criticism,' said Wordsworth, 'though I have talked and am 
daily talking a great deal.'^ And the echoes of this talk 
are everywhere heard in the criticism of the period — in 
Scott's edition of Dryden, in De Quincey's distinction 
between the literature of knowledge and the literature 
of power, which was originally Wordsworth's, in Cole- 
ridge's lectures, and later in chance remarks by Sara 
Coleridge and Aubrey de Vere. In order to understand 
the true relation of Wordsworth's criticism to his poetic 
creation, and to the literature of the past, we must, in 
imagination, continually supply this background of vivid 
conversation. And the beginnings of this are to be sought 
in the development of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in rela- 
tion to their respective circles of friends and critics, long 
before they ever met. 

^L.W.F.z.is2. 



INTRODUCTION XV 

Moreover, the reproduction of this background is par- 
ticularly necessary because of the somewhat tmcompro- 
mising tone of Wordswortli's formal criticism. Though 
his ideals were not wholly original, his personality was. 
What he took from without he translated into terms of his 
own experience, and converted to the substance of a pecu- 
liar and powerful nature — a nature unusually sensitive, and 
yet inflexible even to crudeness and awkwardness. Hence, 
since he always speaks from his own position, and does not 
easily adapt himself to an audience, it is necessary for his 
audience to adapt itself to him, and to discover in each 
case what is behind his utterances. 

This is what has been attempted in this study. Accept- 
ing the poet's own declaration that any one who cares to 
study the matter will see that his principles are in accord- 
ance with the best traditions of English literature, I have 
begun with a review of the theories of poetic diction in 
England before the time of Wordsworth. Then, in the 
light of this study, and of such scanty evidence as we pos- 
sess, I have tried to reconstruct the processes of critical 
thought which were responsible for the experiment of the 
Lyrical Ballads, and to show exactly how this thought 
affected his style— his vocabulary, his syntax, and his rhe- 
torical devices— then and afterwards. And this I have done 
in the belief that his criticism and his practice are mutually 
illustrative, and that both, even in their exaggerations and 
possible mistakes, are of supreme value for the art of 
EngUsh poetry. 



CHAPTER I. 

POETIC DICTION IN 'oUR ELDER POETS.' 

A great poet must create or recreate, not only the taste 
by which he is enjoyed/ but the language in which he 
writes. Like all artists, he must inform a medium already 
developed by others with the new spirit and the new life 
within him, thereby renewing and modifying the outward 
form also. But, -unlike other artists, he derives his medium 
from two sources — from the written words of poets, who 
have thoughtfully adapted it to the purposes of beauty and 
delight, and from the lips of his daily associates, who have 
made a swift and haphazard adaptation of it to the pur- 
poses of immediate utility. Between these two — the writ- 
ten and the oral tradition — the poet, 'singing a song in 
which all other human beings join with him,'^ must make 
his own synthesis, so that the artist and the plowman may 
both hear the message, each in his own tongue. 

Of this duty the inheritors of the fertile English tongue 
have never been wholly neglectful. But their efforts have 
been complicated by a certain individualism in the English 
character. The Englishman, whether poet or plowman, 
likes to speak as he chooses. Between the characteristic 
phraseology of bards who invented their own language, and 
a rich popular speech, fond of short cuts, and uncritically 
hospitable to new locutions, the plain and open path of a 
generally intelligible and beautiful poetic diction has not 
always been easy to find. Nevertheless, it was not for 
want of self-criticism, and the vmremitting efforts of many 

^ A remark attributed by Wordsworth to Coleridge. It is quoted, 
in slightly different forms, in the famous letter to Lady Beaumont 
(May 21, 1807: Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, p. 47), and in the 
Essay Supplementary to the Preface. 

^ Preface to Lyrical Ballads (in a passage added to the original 
preface in 1802). 



2 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

generations, that the typical EngUsh style seemed to 
Matthew Arnold wilful, barbarous, and violent. So it had 
seemed to the most delicate spirits of Elizabethan England, 
wistfully looking to polished Italy and ancient Rome, and 
to their own well of English undefiled in Chaucer, and in 
the light of those standards discovering in their contem- 
porary style some want of measure and grace. So it had 
seemed to the poets of the eighteenth century, scorning the 
rich and various language into which this Elizabethan dic- 
tion had flowered as a luxuriant wildwood growth, which 
it was their task to reduce to French correctness and 
elegance. So it had seemed to Wordsworth, in whose eyes 
the effort of a century had resulted only in a phraseology 
so gaudy and 'licentious,' so lacking in the naturalness 
and good sense which had been constantly preached, that 
the discovery of a standard of expression which would 
protect the reader from the caprice of the poet seemed a 
matter of immediate and paramount importance.^ 

The most powerful and original of all these efforts was 
that of Wordsworth; yet its originality consisted, not in 
the creation of a new ideal of poetic diction, but in the 
vitality with which he informed an old one. Wordsworth 
was not the first to seek his poetic diction in a selection of 
the real language of men, as opposed to a traditional 
literary dialect. Chaucer had done it before, and Chaucer's 
master, Dante; and the method of Chaucer had remained 
the accepted one in English poetry, consciously imitated 
by Spenser, and received by others from Chaucer's own 
source — the vernacular literatures of the Continent, espe- 
cially the Italian and French. Indeed, the modern poetry 
of Europe, in every tongue, is the result of a choice similar 
to that of Wordsworth on the part of poets, when Latin 
was still the speech of the cultivated. In England a power- 

^ Cf. Bagehot, Literary Studies 2. 389 : *A dressy literature, an 
exaggerated literature, seem to be fated to us ; these are our 
curses.' 



POETIC DICTION IN OUR ELDER POETS 3 

£ul literary impulse from abroad, like that received from 
Italy in the sixteenth century, or that from France in 
the seventeenth century, has resulted in a new emphasis 
on a 'selection of the real language' of Englishmen who 
were not too deeply learned, as the only possible basis of 
poetic expression. Not till the latter half of the eighteenth 
century did the ideal of a special vocabulary for poetry 
become widely prevalent in England through the powerful 
influence of Gray; and even then it was opposed by the 
precepts and e::ample of Goldsmith, Cowper, and Burns. 
Hence, when Wordsworth began his attack on the 
'gaudiness and inane phraseology' of contemporary verse, 
with the statement that his practice was in accord with that 
of 'our elder writers, and those in modern times who 
have been the most successful in painting manners and 
passions,'^ he was making a claim easily established by that 
survey of English poetry which he invited his readers to 
undertake. Since a review of this sort throws Words- 
worth's own criticism into its proper perspective, and 
emphasizes the new and vital elements in it, it will be well 
to let it introduce an examination of his own theory and 
practice. In so doing we may have the advantage of a 
running comment by Wordsworth himself on the work of 
his predecessors, since one of the excellences of his 
remarks, as compared with those of many poets before him, 
was their better critical basis in a study and deliberate 
appraisal of English literature in the various stages of its 
development. There are not many men of importance in 
the poetic history of England concerning whom Words- 
worth has not left some illuminating comment; and what 
he left unsaid was generally said by Coleridge, whose 
studies were sometimes the source,^ and sometimes the 
result, of the vital thinking of his less bqpkish friend. 
Accordingly, we may proceed to build upon the foundation 
which they have already laid for us. 

^ Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. 



4 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

Wordsworth and Coleridge divided English literature 
after Chaucer into two great periods — the age of 'our 
elder poets/ and 'modern times/ or the periods before and 
after Dryden's conscious break with the traditions of the 
past. For more than a century it had been the custom to 
date all literary civilization from the reign of Charles II, 
and to speak of the few great, unforgotten poets who had 
the misfortune to write before that time, as the rude fore- 
fathers of English verse, pre-eminent for the mighty force 
of their natural genius, but sadly lacking in art. Chaucer, 
Spenser, Shakespeare, and even Milton, had all been con- 
descendingly rewritten into 'our language as it is now 
refined.' As a late development from this peculiar habit 
of refining, there had arisen the conception of a special 
dialect for poetry — a collection of phrases too delicate for 
ordinary use, or for the expression of vulgar real emotions 
that had a substantial existence outside of books. Against 
all this self-complacent criticism, Wordsworth vigorously 
appealed to the historical facts. The ideal of a special dic- 
tion, or of any refinement except that of pure natural feel- 
ing, was not the ideal of the great age of English poetry 
before Dryden, he said, nor did it correspond to the 
best practice of poets after him. Was he right in this 
contention ? 



I. Chaucer and Spenser. 

Concerning the practice of Chaucer, 'the first finder of 
our fair language,' and Wordsworth's special model in 
respect to language, there can be no doubt. With the well- 
developed literary and courtly medium of French at his 
command, he had turned to the mongrel vernacular, the 
real language of his countrymen, and had found an adequate 
poetic diction in a selection from that. Following here the 
footing of Chaucer's feet, Spenser had labored to restore, 
'as to their rightful heritage,' 'such good and natural Eng- 



POETIC DICTION IN *OUR ELDER POETS 5 

lish words as have been long time out of use and almost 
clean disherited.' To him, or to his apologist 'E. K.,'^ 
it appeared shameful that his countrymen should have 'so 
base regard and bastard judgment' of their own 'natural 
speech which together with their nurse's milk they sucked,' 
that they would not labor to garnish and beautify it by a 
development of its native resources. Since such 'old and 
obsolete words' as Spenser employs were 'most used of 
country-folk,' the reform of the young poet of the Shep- 
Jierd's Calendar had something in common with that of 
the young poet of the Lyrical Ballads. As Wordsworth's 
interest in the language of the middle and lower classes 
of society incidentally involved a return to the speech of 
'our elder poets,' so Spenser's return to the language of 
the one glorious 'elder poet' incidentally involved an 
approximation to rustic dialect.- 



2. Classicists and Purists. 

But Spenser did not stand alone. The purification and 
enrichment of the English language constituted one of the 
burning questions of the day. Scholars, poets, university 
wits, churchmen, and travelers — all had their contribution 
to make, a contribution immediately subjected to the criti- 
cism of the others. Sir Humphrey Gilbert anticipated 

^ Epistle addressed to Gabriel Harvey prefixed to the Shepherd's 
Calendar by E, K. I assume that E. K. represents the opinions 
of Spenser himself, whoever the writer of this apology may be. 

' Coleridge includes practically all the Faerie Queenc in his list 
of the poetry which illustrates Wordsworth's ideal of a beautiful 
diction which is, at the same time, the language of conversation. 
'Spite of the licentiousness with which Spenser occasionally com- 
pels the orthography of his words into a subservience to his rhymes, 
the whole "Faery Queen" is an almost continued instance of this 
beauty' — i. e. the beauty of verse 'in which everything was expressed 
just as one would wish to talk, and yet all dignified, attractive, and 
interesting.' — B. L. 2. 71. 



6 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Dryden and Matthew Arnold in planning an English acad- 
em}'^, for the purpose of developing the resources of the 
vulgar tongue.^ Under the influence of similar efforts on 
the Continent, Englishmen began to consider the develop- 
ment of the national speech a patriotic duty. All flourish- 
ing states and politic commonwealths, remarks Gabriel 
Harvey," have made the most of their own languages. Italy, 
Spain, and France have spared no efforts to exalt their 
own tongues over those of Greece and Rome; only the 
English are backward in this respect. And Ascham 
observes that when a nation ceases to care for its own 
speech, its strength and moral integrity decline. A rude 
and disorderly style is a sign of a rude and disorderly 
character.^ 

The desired improvement had been partly attained 
through the deliberate importation of words from other 
languages, especially Latin. In 1542, at a meeting of 
Convocation, Bishop Gardiner had presented a list of about 
a hundred Latin words which he wished either retained in 
their original form, in the proposed revision of the Great 
Bible, 'for their genuine and native meaning, and for the 
majesty of the matter in them contained,' or 'fitly Eng- 
lished with the least alteration.'* Some of the proposed 
additions are such familiar words as contrite (contritus), 
idiot (idiota), baptize {haptizare), martyr, ceremony {cere- 
monia), etc. Equally familiar to a reader of to-day are 
many of the words 'new made ... of a Latin or 
French word' employed by Sir Thomas Elyot in The Gov- 
ernour, where he takes great care to provide a gloss in the 
text itself by coupling with them words of the same mean- 

^ Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views, pp. 96, 168-169. 
^ Gregory Smith i. 123-124. 
^ Ibid. I. 6. Cf. Timber, ed. Schelling, p. 32. 

* Tudor-Stuart Views, pp. 89-90. Moore quotes from Mombert, 
English Versions of the Bible, 1907, pp. 230-231. 



POETIC DICTION IN OUR ELDER POETS 7 

ing already in good use — 'animate or give courage/ 'good 
kind or lineage,' 'facile or easy/ 'gross and ponderous' — or 
by giving the definition — 'metamorphosis, which is as much 
as to say the changing of man into other figure or form.'^ 
But this zeal for patching the language with borrowings 
from abroad, to which Spenser objected, was condemned by 
men of scholarly instinct and training, like Sir John Cheke, 
Roger Ascham, Gabriel Harvey, and Sir Philip Sidney, 
who strove to do for the literary English of the Renaissance 
what Wordsworth tried to do for the language of the 
eighteenth century— -to purify it from the arbitrary con- 
ceits and curious inventions in which the Elizabethan mind 
rejoiced, and to make it correspond, as far as possible, to 
the actual spoken vernacular. 'Among all other lessons 
this should first be learned,' says Thomas Wilson in the 
Arte of Rhetorique,^ 'that we never affect any strange ink- 
horn terms, but so speak as is commonly received; neither 
seeking to be over fine or yet living over careless, using 
our speech as most men do, and ordering our wits as the 
fewest have done.' This same idea reappears in the 
remark attributed by Ascham to his master Sir John Cheke. 
The excellence of the language of Caesar and Cicero, said 
Sir John Cheke,^ was due to the fact that they were 'daily 
orators amongst the common people and greatest counsel- 
lors in the Senate house, and therefore gave themselves to 
use such speech as the meanest should well understand and 
the wisest best allow, following carefully that good counsel 
of Aristotle, loquendum lit multi, sapiendum ut pauci.' 
The result of this Elizabethan ideal in the poetry of the 
next century was observed by Coleridge: 'In the elder 
poets, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic, 
out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine 

^ Tudor-Stuart Views, pp. 82-89. 

^ Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Mair, p. 162. 

^Gregory Smith i. 40. 



8 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

mother English; in the modern poets the most obvious 
thoughts in language the most fantastic and arbitrary.'^ 
The ideal of loquendum ut multi was applied to verse as 
well as to prose. Nothing was more sacred to the scholarly 
critics of verse in the sixteenth century, who were prepar- 
ing the way for the marvelous flowering of the English 
genius in Shakespeare and his brother poets, than the idiom 
of the vernacular — those characteristic turns of speech 
which own no law but the habit of the people, what a 
Wordsworth of that day might have meant by 'language 
actually used by men.' 'Eschew strange words,' says 
Gascoigne,- 'or obsoleta et inusita, unless the theme do give 
just occasion. . . . You shall do very well to use your 
verse after the English phrase, and not after the manner 
of other languages. . . . Even as I have advised you 
to place all words in their natural and most common or 
usual pronunciation, so I would wish to frame all sen- 
tences in their mother phrase and proper idioma. Similarly 
Harvey objects to Spenser's altering the quantity of any 
one syllable otherwise than as 'our common speech and 
general received custom' will bear him out. 'We are not 
to go a little farther . . . than we are licensed and 
authorized by the ordinary use, and custom, and propriety, 
and idiom, and, as it were, the majesty of our speech, which 
I account the only infallible and sovereign Rule of all 
Rules,' he says, referring Spenser to Horace's penes usum, 
and ius, and norma loquendi.^ This philosophy was 
expressed in more violent terms in the famous controversy 
between Nash and Harvey, in which each sent his opponent 
a list of his offenses against the sacred 'majesty of our 

B. L. I. 15. Cf. Schopenhaur, 'A poet should think like a genius, 
but talk the same language as any one else'— a saying used by A. J. 
George to illustrate Wordsworth's ideal of expression. See Words- 
worth's Prefaces, pp. 105-106. 

^ Gregory Smith i. 52-53. 

^ Ibid. I. 117-119. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'OUR ELDER POETS' 9 

Speech/ and loudly accused him of being that most 
detestable of all literary criminals — an inkhornist.^ 

Nevertheless, these defenders of the idiom are the clas- 
sicists of the day, opposing to every innovation not only 
the law of their own language, but the shining examples 
of antiquity. Yet theirs is a vital and wholesome classicism, 
which looks, not to the letter, but to the spirit, of the law, 
and really succeeds in translating the advice of Cicero, 
Horace, and Quintilian into terms of their own needs 
and experience. What could be more sensible than 
Ascham's remarks on the style of the Latin classics? He 
reminds his countrymen that the excellence of Cicero's 
language was not something peculiar to himself — a literary 
achievement; it was the reflection of the conversation of 
the cultivated men of his time. The style of Cicero's let- 
ters, he observes, differs very little from the style of those 
who wrote to him. Behind the eloquence of Cicero, and 
the chaste and simple diction of Terence, lies a good habit 
of daily speech, 'the pure fine talk of Rome, which was 
used by the flower of the worthiest nobility that ever Rome 
bred.'^ Sir Philip Sidney represents the same classical 
good sense, before it had become so rigid and self-com- 
placent that it had ceased to be sensible at all. It leads 
him, not only into a mild objection to Spenser's archaisms, 
but to an anticipation of tw^o of the leading principles of 
Wordsworth's criticism. Quite in the spirit of the Appen- 
dix on Poetic Diction, he censures imitators of the classics 
for reproducing the peculiarities which, in Cicero, are the 
natural expression of genuine passion, when there is no 
passion to be expressed. And so, he says, 'they do that 
artificially v/hich we see men do in choler naturally.'^ Had 

^ Ibid. 2. 275. 

'Gregory Smith i. 28. 

^ Ibid. I. 202. Cf. Wordsworth: 'The earliest poets of all 
nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events ; 
they wrote naturally, and as men : feeling powerfully as they did, 
their language was daring and figurative. In later times, Poets, 



lO WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

critics and poets always retained this vivid consciousness 
that the classical writers were men like themselves, speak- 
ing 'naturally and as men/ instead of dead models of a 
perfect excellence, the utterances of Wordsworth would 
have been less necessary, and would have seemed less 
revolutionary. Again, Sidney anticipates Wordsworth in 
his method of testing verse by writing it into prose. 
Besides Chaucer's Troilus, the Mirror of Magistrates, and 
the Shepherd's Calendar, he remembered few verses that 
had poetical sinews in them ; 'for proof whereof,' he says, 
iet but most of the verses be put in prose, and then ask 
the meaning; and it will be found that one verse did but 
beget another, without ordering at the first what should be 
at the last; which becomes a confused mass of words with 
a tingling sound of rime, barely accompanied with reason.'^ 
However, we cannot say that the two doctrines especially 
associated with the name of Wordsworth appear in Eliza- 
bethan literary criticism in quite the form in which they are 
generally understood by his readers. The 'common use' 
or 'common speech' so often referred to is not strictly the 
language of conversation in the lower and middle classes. 
Though Wilson seems to object to the formation of a 
literary language, as opposed to the language of country- 
folk,2 and Spenser implies that the well of English unde- 
filed may be sought, in some instances, among the 
peasantry, Puttenham's definition of standard English — a 
selection of the real language of well-bred men within a 
radius of sixty miles around London^ — seems to be the 

and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence 
of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect with- 
out being animated by the same passion, set themsehes to a mechan- 
ical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them, 
sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them 
to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connexion 
whatsoever.' — Appendix to Lyrical Ballads of 1802. 

^ Gregory Smith i. 196. 

^ Arte of Rhetorique, p. 164. 

^Gregory Smith 2. 150. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'OUR ELDER POETS' II 

accepted one. But these well-bred men are not pedants or 
university wits. They are men of affairs who speak clearly 
and intelligently, with more regard for matter than for 
words. Hence what Wordsworth perhaps was really 
seeking— a speech which was universally intelligible, and 
not the arbitrary creation of poets — was also the goal of 
these stout defenders of the 'common use' and the 
'generally received custom.' 

Again, though Dr. Johnson^ says that before Dryden 
there was no poetical diction, no system of words especially 
refined and appropriated to poetry, it is generally imaplied 
in Elizabethan criticism that there is some difference, apart 
from metre, between the language of prose and the lan- 
guage of verse. Verse, says Puttenham,^ is *a manner of 
utterance more eloquent and rhetorical than the ordinary 
prose which we use in our daily talk, because it is decked 
and set out with all manner of fresh colors and figures, 
which maketh that it sooner inveigleth the judgement of 
men, and carrieth their opinion this way and that, whither- 
soever the heart by the impression of the ear shall be most 
affectionately bent and directed.' Nevertheless, though as 
much difference as this definition suggests is generally 
taken for granted, the efforts to purify the literary language 
are apparently directed toward prose and verse alike, and 
the same standard is usually applied to both.^ This stand- 
ard is to be found both in Horace's Art of Poetry, and in 
Cicero's Orator and Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory.^ 
The transference to verse of the ideal of a pure and 
universally intelligible diction which the greatest of Roman 

'^Dryden {Lives, ed. Hill, i. 420). 

^ Gregory Smith 2. 8-9. 

^ Gascoigne says : 'You may use the same figures or tropes in 
verse which are used in prose.' — Gregory Smith i. 52. 

* The references to these authorities in EHzabethan criticism are 
too numerous to reproduce here. They may be found by consult- 
ing the excellent index at the end of the second volume of Eliza- 
bethan Critical Essays. 



12 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

orators had acquired from a study of the Greek classics, 
on the one hand, and from his own experience as a 'daily 
orator among the common people,' on the other hand, 
tended to maintain a wholesome relation between poetry 
and prose. 

The peculiar vitality of the Elizabethan classicism, crude 
as it was — this sense of a living contact of man with man 
in discipleship — enabled the critics of the age to approach 
more nearly to the spirit of their teachers than did many 
who felt themselves better instructed. Their faith in the 
necessity of preserving the native idiom at all costs, and of 
modifying the method of the Latin writers to serve their 
own purpose, nearly resembled the attitude of their masters 
to Greek — the attitude of Cicero, especially. He had 
always emphasized the necessity of following the law of his 
own language, inferior as it was by nature, and of admit- 
ting no foreign splendor incompatible with it. Those who 
had learned this lesson from him had learned something 
far better than a servile regard for correctness, and the 
disposition, not wholly unknown in antiquity, to plunder 
the classics of every figure of speech and every flower of 
poesy, and deck out their own verse in the unnatural spoils. 
This vital relation to Greek, and especially to Latin, poetry 
and literary criticism also enabled the Elizabethan critics to 
reproduce without too much exaggeration the classical 
attitude to verse and prose. This had more and more 
tended to emphasize the essential community between the 
two types of expression, without, however, failing to 
recognize the differences resulting sometimes from a dif- 
ference in purpose, and always from a difference in the 
associations and the external effect of the medium. Thus 
the relation of the more scholarly Elizabethans to their 
ancient models was somewhat like the relation of Sidney's 
ideal poet to Nature. Lifted in the glory of their own 
freedom, they were preparing themselves to go hand in 
hand with the classics, not bound within the narrow war- 



POETIC DICTION IN 'OUR ELDER POETS' 1 3 

ranty of their masters' gifts, but freely ranging only within 
the zodiac of their own wit. 



J. The Heirs of the Elizabethan Tradition in the 
Seventeenth Century. 

In the seventeenth century this wholesome Elizabethan 
tradition comes to a rather violent end — not to be revived 
again until the days of Coleridge and Wordsworth ; and 
what Coleridge calls the second period of our language 
begins with the criticism and poetry of Dryden. During 
the earlier part of the century the Elizabethan ideals were 
maintained, not only by the plain and manly classicism of 
Ben Jonson, whom Dryden regarded as his master, but by 
two lesser poets, Drayton and Daniel, who made a peculiar 
appeal to Wordsworth and Coleridge, and w^ere consciously 
imitated by them. Ben Jonson was apparently less attrac- 
tive to the poets of the Lyrical Ballads, because he lacked 
the tenderness of heart that was associated with Words- 
worth's ideal of simple expression ; but he, too, battled 
bravely with the besetting sins of English style, and 
sought, in his own incomparable phrase, to 'redeem arts 
from their rough and braky seats, where they lay hid and 
overgrown with thorns, to a pure, open, and flowery light, 
where they may take the eye and be taken by the hand.'^ 
But in this effort he did not strive to lift the literary 
language too far above the understanding of the vulgar 
multitude, whom, nevertheless, he frankly scorned. 'Pure 
and neat language I love,' he says, 'but plain and cus- 
tomary.'^ This plain and customary style, which resulted 
from the striving after the golden mean in speech as well 
as in the rule of life, in Jonson's own time did not wholly 
escape the censure directed against simplicity in Words- 
worth's day. 'The true artificer will not run away from 

' Timber, ed. Schelling, p. 7. 
^Ihid., p. 59. 



14 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Nature as if he were afraid of her/ he observes, *or 
depart from Ufe and the Ukeness of truth, but speak to the 
capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ 
from the vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, 
with the Tamerlanes and the Tamer-chams of the late age, 
which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and 
vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers. . . . 
In the meantime, perhaps, he is called barren, dull, lean, a 
poor writer, or by what contumelious word can come in 
their cheeks, by these men who without labor, judgment, 
knowledge, or almost sense, are received or preferred before 
him. He gratulates them and their fortune. Another 
age or juster men will acknowledge the virtues of his 
studies.'^ This suggests the very tone of Wordsworth 
with reference to the more popular and showy graces of 
Scott and Byron. Jonson's scorn of rhetoric 'that cannot 
suffer the sun or a shower, nor bear the open air,' his 
liking for 'strength and sinews' in verse or prose, echo 
Sidney, and anticipate the emphasis of Wordsworth and 
Coleridge on poetic substance — that substratum of fact and 
sense in verse which remains when it is turned into prose, 
or subjected to the test of intellectual analysis. 

Meanwhile Drayton, too, was looking back with some 
complacency to the passing of the violent splendors of the 
'Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the late age,' and the 
banishing of superfluous alliteration, forced antitheses, 
and far-fetched similitudes from a ridiculous natural his- 
tory, which Euphues had made popular, and Sir Philip 
Sidney had striven to laugh out of existence. Sidney, 
writes Drayton,^ 

throughly pac'd our language, as to show- 
That plenteous English hand in hand might go 
With Greek and Latin, and did first reduce 
Our tongue from Lillie's writing then in use. 

^ Timber, ed. Schelling, pp. 26-27. 
^ Spingarn i. 137. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'oUR ELDER POETS 15 

By its effect upon Wordsworth, Drayton's own energetic 
and manly, though not highly poetic, style, illustrative of 
the purified Elizabethan diction, furnishes another link 
between the ideals of this age and those of the reforma- 
tion at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A still 
greater favorite with Wordsworth was Samuel Daniel, 
w^ho, as Drayton said, wrote pure and excellent English, 
though his 'manner better fitted prose.' In Wordsworth's 
eyes this reputation for a diction too unadorned was 
naturally no discredit. Both in his literary criticism and 
in his own poetry, Daniel represented the native tradition, 
in opposition to those who had too fond a regard for alien 
elegancies. The ideal which Harvey, Spenser, and Sidney 
had applied to language, while they rather inconsistently 
dallied with classical metres, Daniel, in his controversy 
with Campion, applied to versification also. Every tongue, 
he says, has not only its own idiom, but its own peculiar 
music, endeared to the hearts of the people through long 
association. If we speak the language of our own people, 
why should we not sing the tunes of our people too? Let 
us keep our 'tinkerly sound' of rhyme despite the Greeks 
and the Romans, and cease this attempt to tune our ears 
to foreign harmonies.^ In substituting the simple melody 
of the old popular ballads, and all the varied rhythms in 
which lyrical emotion naturally expresses itself, for the 
regular music of the heroic couplet, Wordsworth had 
worked in the spirit of this creed, though his objection to 
Pope's versification was only a corollary to his main thesis. 
Meanwhile, the eternal adversary of pure English style, 
having been partly conquered in the form of Euphuisji, 
reappeared in a new shape in the metaphysical poets, 
and left lingering traces of itself in the quaint and 
balanced prose of Sir Thomas Browne and his school. The 
fault of the metaphysical poets was not that they did not 
speak genuine English, but that they did not speak the 

^ Gregory Smith 2. 356-384. 



1 6 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

'genuine language of passion.'^ Nevertheless, in their pur- 
suit of far-fetched similes and out-of-way thoughts, they 
displayed an intellectual power and a clearness of conception 
which kept Wordsworth and Coleridge from a wholesale 
condemnation of them. 'Read all Cowley ; he is very valu- 
able to a collector of English sound sense,' said Words- 
worth, who nevertheless condemned the taste of an age in 
which the booksellers' stalls in London swarmed with the 
folios of this 'able writer and amiable man', while Milton 
was neglected.^ But in Cowley's own age the metaphysical 
school did not escape the censure that always awaits 
offenders against Nature and simplicity, popular as they too 
often are. The rough versification of Donne, of whom 
Ben Jonson said that 'for not keeping the accent he deserved 
hanging,'^ the wild metres of Cowley's Pindaric odes, and 
what Addison called the general Gothicism of taste 
among these curious thinkers, began to weary the gay 
spirits of the Restoration; and they turned with relief to 
the easy and mellifluous couplets of Waller, which 
demanded no effort on the part of the reader either to 
scan them or to comprehend their meaning. Thence came 
that mighty reform which in a single generation rendered 
the style of all English poetry hitherto hopelessly anti- 
quated, and in 1675, the year after Milton's death, had 
produced an almost complete silence of all singers 'beyond 
the verge of the present age.'* 



4. Milton. 

• But before we consider this new school of poetry and 
poetic diction, which prevailed down to the time of Words- 
worth, and against which his criticism was chiefly directed, 

JB.L. I. 15. 

" Essay Supplementary to the Preface. 

^ Spingarn i. 211. 

^ Ibid. 2. 263. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'oUR ELDER POETS 17 

we must turn aside for a moment to do honor to the 
splendid and lonely figure of Milton. It is not inappro- 
priate that this brief mention of him should seem like a 
digression, an interruption of the main course of the dis- 
cussion. Despite his manifold relations to literature and 
the political life of his own time, he seems to stand apart — 
to represent ideals which are peculiarly his own, and not, 
as in the case of Spenser and Shakespeare, simply the 
most glorious expression of a spirit common to a whole 
literary group. But this appearance of loneliness is due 
to the fact that Milton's proper background is not England 
alone, but the Continent. In spite of his intense patriotism, 
he thinks of himself as one of a European commonwealth 
of scholars and poets. As such he is not only an EngUsh- 
man, but a representative of England. When we place him 
where he consciously belonged, in the main stream of the 
European Renaissance, we discover that he too is express- 
ing, in terms of his continental relationships, the ideal 
which we have discovered in the most fruitful Elizabethan 
criticism, as well as in the prefaces of Wordsworth. Like 
his Italian masters, he thinks of the cultivated and literary 
language at his command as being, not a certain kind of 
English, but Latin ; and the speech of the people as being, 
not the language of the country as opposed to that of the 
town, or the language of unaffected, well-bred men as 
opposed to the language of wits or pedants, but the whole 
of the English language as compared with the universal 
literary medium of Europe. When the choice between this 
literary language and the spoken vernacular is thus pre- 
sented to his mind, he unhesitatingly elects the latter. *I 
applied myself to that resolution which Ariosto followed 
against the persuasion of Bembo,' he says,^ *to fix all the 
industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native 
tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end (that were 
a toilsome vanity) ; but to be an interpreter and relater of 

^ Spingarn i. 195. 



i8 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

the best and sagest things among mine own citizens 
throughout this island in the mother dialect. That what 
the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern 
Italy, and those Hebrews of old, did for their country, I, 
in my proportion, with this over and above of being a 
Christian, might do for mine ; not caring to be once named 
abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content 
with these British islands as my world.' This sentiment 
was read and echoed by Wordsworth, who consciously tried 
to take up the work of Milton, and to carry out some of his 
plans for relating the best and sagest things among his 
own citizens.^ Hence, even Milton, whose diction is the 
very antithesis of the 'language of conversation in the 
lower and middle classes,' and who certainly was respon- 
sible for some of the dulcia vitia in the poetry of the eigh- 
teenth century, proves upon examination to hold an ideal 
not altogether different from that of Wordsworth. The 
difference in their application of it was due to the immense 
range of Milton's historical and geographical imagination, 
and to his cosmopolitan culture. What a little group of 
lakes and hills was to Wordsworth, 'these British islands' 
were to Milton. He could localize his conceptions no 
further. As Wordsworth modifies the language of con- 
versation in order to give it the melody and grace of the 
English poets whom he loves, so Milton raises and har- 
monizes the homely or over-luxuriant vernacular to the 
dignity of Greek and Latin. 

^ See Prelude i. 168-169, and the brief preface to Artegal and 
Elidure. 



CHAPTER 2. 

POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES/ 

Milton was the last of the elder poets. Even in his 
own lifetime, a reform had begun which was to render him 
almost as obsolete as Spenser and Shakespeare. Despite 
the efforts of the Elizabethan classicists and purists, Eng- 
lish poetry hitherto had never attained to that even sim- 
plicity which had been the ideal of many. There were still 
'rough and braky seats' between its purple patches of 
flowery bloom. In Shakespeare there is no such relation 
between taste and genius, inspiration and moderating good 
sense, the glowing inner life and the gracious external 
manner, as that which we find in the tragedies of Sopho- 
cles; even in Milton there is an occcasional harshness and 
irregularity of style which seems crude beside the bright 
and limpid verse of Homer.^ As the first flush of the won- 
derful creative energy of the Renaissance died away, this 
disproportion became more and more evident.^ It was 

^ From the standpoint of the new school of poetic diction, Phillips, 
Milton's nephew, refers to 'Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete 
words' and his 'rough hewn, clouterly verses,' and Shakespeare 
'with all his unfiled expressions' and his 'rambling and indigested 
fancies' (Spingarn 2. 271). Dryden speaks in a similar tone, 
though in somewhat less picturesque terms : 'Yet it must be allowed 
to the present age that the tongue in general is so much refined 
since Shakespeare's time that many of his words, and more of his 
phrases, are scarce intelligible. And, of those which we understand, 
some are ungrammatical, others coarse, and his whole style is so 
pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is 
obscure' (Ker i. 203). 

" Sprat's analysis of the influence of the Civil Wars upon the 
language is interesting in this connection : 'The truth is, it has 
hitherto been a little too carelessly handled, and, I think, has had 
less labor spent about its polishing than it deserves. Till the time 
of King Henry the Eighth, there was scarce any man regarded it 
but Chaucer, and nothing was written in it which one would be 



20 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

then discovered that, while poets had been singing so 
sweetly, and speaking so clearly and well, the laws of 
English prosody and grammar had never been really 
defined.^ Each man had found them out for himself. The 
treatises of Gascoigne and Puttenham had been individual 

willing to read twice but some of his poetry. But then it began 
to raise itself a little, and to sound tolerably well. From that age 
down to our late Civil Wars, it was still fashioning and beautifying 
itself. In the wars themselves (.which is a time wherein all lan- 
guages use, if ever, to increase by extraordinary degrees, for in 
such busy and active times there arise more new thoughts of men 
which must be signified and varied by new expressions), then, I say, 
it received many fantastical terms, which were introduced by our 
religious sects, and many outlandish phrases, which several writers 
and translators in that great hurry brought in and made free as they 
pleased, and withal it was enlarged by many sound and necessary 
forms and idioms. . . . And now, when men's minds are somewhat 
settled and their passions allayed, ... if some sober and judicious 
men would take the whole mass of our language into their hands 
as they find it, and would set a mark on the ill words, correct those 
which are to be retained, admit and establish the good, and make 
some emendations in the accent and grammar, I dare pronounce 
that our speech would quickly arrive at as much plenty as it is 
capable to receive, and at the greatest smoothness which its deriva- 
tion from the rough German will allow it' — Spingarn 2. Ii3-I4- 

^ See William Wotton's review of English grammar down to 
1694 (Spingarn 3. 224-225). He says very sensibly: 'For, in the 
first place, it ought to be considered that every tongue has its own 
peculiar form as well as its proper words, not communicable to, 
nor to be regulated by the analogy of another language; where- 
fore he is the best grammarian who is the perfectest master of 
the analogy of the language which he is about, and gives the truest 
rules by which another man may learn it. Next, to apply this to 
our own tongue, it may certainly be affirmed that the grammar 
of English is so far our own that skill in the learned languages is 
not necessary to comprehend it Ben Jonson was the first man that 
I know of that did anything considerable in it; but Lyly's grammar 
was his pattern, and for want of reflecting upon the grounds of a 
language which he understood as well as any man of his age, he 
drew it by violence to a dead language that was of a different make, 
and so left his work imperfect' Some years before this (in 1679) 
Dryden had written: 'In the age of that poet [^schylus] the 



POETIC DICTION IN MODERN TIMES 21 

efforts only; there had been no general and consistent 
attempt on the part of the whole literary world to discover 
exactly what constituted the virtues and vices of poetic 
style. If the classical and puristic criticism, which had 
hitherto been the organizing and restraining influence in 
English verse, was not to fail entirely, it must cease to be 
general and spasmodic. It was now necessary to descend 
to minutiae, and to develop a standard so narrow and defi- 
nite that its demands should be always quite unmistakable. 
It was not enough to say that poets should make a judicious 
selection from the spoken language. All the literary 
expressions that did not occur in that language must be 
interdicted one by one, specifically and by name; and the 
interpretation of the phrase, 'judicious selection', must not 
be left to the judgment of every scribbler. The wild 
individualism of the metaphysical school had shown that 
private judgments were not to be trusted. 

Hence came the reform of Dryden and his school. They 
did not invent a new standard; they merely tried to make 
the Latin standard inherited from Sidney through Ben 
Jonson as specific and practical as possible. It was the old 
war, conducted with slightly different tactics, on the old 
enemy in a new guise, with substantial re-enforcements 
from France. Even before the Revolution the sons of Ben, 
with their doughty sire, had begun to anticipate the con- 
ception of a more chastened style and a smoother versi- 
fication.^ Ben Jonson seemed to Dryden to illustrate the 

Greek language was arrived to its full perfection ; they had amongst 
them an exact standard of writing and speaking. The English 
language is not capable of such certainty; and we are so far 
from it that we are wanting in the very foundation of it, a perfect 
grammar' (Preface to Troilus and Cressida, Ker i. 203). In 1693 
he wrote: 'We have yet no English prosodia, not so much as 
a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a 
manner barbarous' {ibid. 2. no). 

' See Schelling, 'Ben Jonson and the Classical School,' Pub. Mod. 
Lang. Assoc. 13. 235. 



22 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

ideal of correctness which was to dominate the eighteenth 
century. Jonson, he said, 'is to be admired for many 
excellencies; and can be taxed with fewer failings than 
any English poet.'^ But to the Horatian criticism of the 
royal Ben was now added the Horatian criticism of Mal- 
herbe and Boileau and the new French Academy,^ which 
insisted on the need of discarding the tawdry and outworn 
decorations of the old poetic diction, in favor of a judicious 
selection from the spoken language. In England, as in 
France, *an attack was directed against distortions and 
intricacies in all forms of literature. The substitution of 
general for technical terms and imagery, the elimination of 
the Latin coinage of Browne and his school, . . . the 
attempt to make literature approximate more and more to 
conversation, the trend toward precision of word and 
idea — these are different phases of the same movement, 
and all find reasoned expression in the criticism of the 
period.'^ A certain sobriety and externality in the new 
criticism was mainly due to the loss of energy which had 
made the reform necessary and possible. The splendor and 
bravery of the old lawlessness was gone, and with it some 
of the freedom and spirit which had animated the stout 
defenders of the law. But the vivid animation was no 
longer necessary. Henceforth there was to be a steady and 
peaceable conquest. 

The relation of the criticism of Dryden and Pope to the 
age of Shakespeare and the aberrations of the metaphysical 
school may be best described in the language of Petit de 
JuUeville concerning the relation of Malherbe and Boileau 

^Ker I. 138. Dryden notes also that Jonson 'did a little too 
much Romanize our tongue.' — Ibid. i. 82. 

^ 'La principale fonction de I'Academie sera de travailler avec 
tout le soin et toute la diligence possible, a donner des regies cer- 
taines a notre langue, et a la rendre pure, eloquente et capable de 
traiter les arts et les sciences.' — Quoted by Petit de JuUeville from 
the statutes of the Academy, Histoire 4. 138. 

^ Spingarn, p. xlviii. 



POETIC DICTION IN MODERN TIMES 23 

to the poetry of the Pleiade. The situation is almost 
exactly parallel. 'Ce n'est point manquer de respect a Mal- 
herbe, ni d'admiration pour son oeuvre que de dire: apres 
I'effort violent, tumultueux, desordonne de la Pleiade et de 
cette foule de poetes qu'elle suscita derriere elle, il etait 
natural que le gout public, un peu fatigue par les hardi- 
esses des novateurs, se montrat dispose a favoriser sur- 
tout des qualites toutes differentes: une facture ferme et 
soutenue dans le vers, fiit-elle un peu monotone; une 
ordonnance reguliere dans la composition, dut le poete y 
montrer plus de sagesse dans le raisonnement que de 
vivacite d'imagination ; une langue reguliere, sobre et 
chatiee, tout opposee a I'exuberance de Ronsard et de son 
ecole. Malherbe repondit merveilleusement a cette dis- 
position generale des esprits, prets a goiiter paisiblement 
un excellent ecrivain en vers, plutot qu' a suivre dans les 
nues un grand poete intemperant.'^ 

In England the poets who marvelously responded to the 
demands of the change in public taste were those rather 
insignificant versifiers, Waller and Denham^ ; and to them, 
accordingly, the credit of the reform was generally given. 
But, as Dr. Johnson points otit, the authority of such natur- 
ally minor persons would have been ineffectual without the 
powerful support of Dryden. Enlisting under the banners 
of Aristotle, Horace, Ben Jonson, and Corneille, he began 
a mighty onslaught on the sins of the old poetic diction, 
and inaugurated at once the modern period of English 
prose and the age of the heroic couplet. But Dryden's 
own heedless practice was not the best possible recommen- 
dation of 'correctness.* It was not until the patiently 

^ Histoire 4. i. This chapter is by Petit de Julleville himself. 

^ 'After about a half a century of forced thoughts and rugged 
metres some advances toward nature and harmony had been made 
by Waller and Denham.' — Life of Dryden (Lives i. 419). See ibid. 
I. 393, notes I and 6, for a list of some of the numerous references 
in the eighteenth century to Denham's strength and Waller's 
sweetness. 



24 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

artistic Pope took up the good work that the triumph of 
the new style was complete. In the development of the art 
and fame of Pope, and the reaction against Pope, are 
summed up the whole history of English literature between 
Milton and Wordsworth. The period ended in a wholesale 
abolishment of poetic diction, and a return to the spoken 
language as the source and standard of literary expression. 
We do not usually recall that it began in exactly the same 
manner. 



I. The Development of the School of Pope. 

Although Dryden and Pope were later celebrated as the 
discoverers of those elegances and flowers of speech on 
which the eighteenth century especially plumed itself,^ 
these were an indirect result of their practice, rather than 
a direct aim of their criticism. The point was not to 
develop a new poetic diction, but to get rid of an old one ; 
and the attempt was chiefly directed against what all must 
admit to be vices in any style — careless workmanship, and 
a system of antiquated words or forms of words which 
did not correspond to the language as it was actually 
spoken. In both cases the effort was negative rather than 
positive, characterized by Thou shalt nots rather than by 
Thou shahs. 

The desire to avoid careless workmanship — to trust noth- 
ing to the caprice of the poet — led to the development of 
a standard metre, the heroic couplet, which had been a 

^ 'There was, therefore, before the time of Dryden no poetical 
diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of 
domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated 
to particular arts. . . , Those happy combinations of words 
which distinguish poetry from prose had rarely been attempted; 
we had few elegances or flowers of speech ; the roses had not yet 
been plucked from the bramble, or different colors had not yet 
been joined to enliven one another.' — Dryden {Lives i. 420). 



POETIC DICTION IN MODERN TIMES 25 

favorite with Ben Jonson/ and had become increasingly 
popular through the century. The rules for the manipu- 
lation of this type of verse became so strict that the art of 
packing thoughts and feelings of every sort into these 
neat lines w^ithout any apparent difficulty might seem to 
demand a miracle of ingenuity.- In the first place, the 
poet must close the sense with the couplet. These couplets 
he must make metrically readable, without departing from 
the normal character and relation of words in prose. He 
must invert the order as little as possible,^ and must avoid 
the use of words unnecessary to the sense, or forms that 
had become obsolete. Under this latter type were included 
the expletive do,"^ and the old ending of the second and 
third person of the present indicative est^ and eth. 
Moreover, the versification must be not only readable, but 
distinctly melodious to the ear.^ There must be no hiatus," 
no wearisome repetition of the same vowel, no clash of 

^ 'Aside from his strictly lyrical verse, in which Jonson shared the 
metrical inventiveness of his age, the decasyllabic rimed couplet 
was all but his constant measure.' Schelling, 'Ben Jonson and the 
Classical School/ Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc. 13. 235, 

^ See Pope's letter on versification, Letters i. 56-59. 

^ Cf . the Earl of Musgrave's Essay upon Poetry (Spingarn 2, 
288) : 

Th' expression easy, and the fancy high. 

Yet that not seems to creep, nor this to fly; 

No words transpos'd, but in such just cadence 

As though, hard .wrought, may seem th' effect of chance. 

* Dr. Johnson censures Waller for using the expletive do very 
frequently, 'though he lived to see it almost universally ejected.' — 
Waller (Lives i. 294). Cf. Pope, Essay on Criticism 347. Dryden 
is not careful to avoid the expletive; there are four examples of it 
in the first fifteen lines of Absalom and Achitophel. 

^ 'He sometimes uses the obsolete termination of verbs,' says 
Dr. Johnson of Waller, mentioning this as another 'abatement' of 
his 'excellence in versification.' 

® Pope, Essay on Criticism 364. 

^ Ibid. 345: 'Though oft the ear the open vowels tire.' But cf. 
his remarks on hiatus, Letters i. 58. Pope says that in all Mal- 
herbe's poems he found but one example of hiatus. — Letters i. 78. 



26 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

consonants; the music must be full, clear, and continually 
varied.^ The rhyme must be exact,- and must fall on 
naturally accented syllables, not on weak words like of, to, 
etc. If to all these virtues the poet could add the sweet- 
ness of alliteration, for which Waller was famed, and the 
onomatopoeic skill displayed by Dryden in his song for 
St. Cecilia's day, and by Pope in his Essay on Criticism, 
he was in a fair way to escape the censure that awaited 
the careless craftsman. To be a good craftsman, a thor- 
ough master of the technique of rhyming, was the chief 
ambition of the poets of the new generation. For it they 
were willing to surrender all claim to those rarer graces 
that lie beyond the reach of art. 

While this emphasis upon correctness and polish in 
versification naturally led to a similar emphasis in the 
choice of words, the reform began in France with a notable 
anticipation of Wordsworth's preference for the language 
of the lower and middle classes. Of the literary principles 
of Malherbe, Petit de Julleville writes^:' *Elle se reduit a 
un petit nombre de preceptes, plutot negatifs; comme de 
decrire les choses par leur traits les plus generaux; de 
relever seulement, par une harmonic savante et un habile 
arrangement, des idees et expressions si simples qu'en des 
mains moins adroites elles sembleraient purement pro- 
saiques. Cette simplicite presque banale des termes 

^ 'T is all we can do to give sufficient sweetness to our language : 
we must not only choose our words for elegance, but for sound; 
to perform which a mastery in the language is required ; but the 
poet must have a magazine of words, and have the art to manage 
his few vowels to the best advantage, that they may go further. 
He must also know the nature of the vowels, which are more 
sonorous, and which more soft and sweet.' — Ker 2. 215-216. 

^ See Johnson's remarks on Waller's rhymes. — Waller (Lives i. 
294). Pope's rhymes were not always exact; see the list of inexact 
rhymes in the concordance to Pope. Klopstock remarked upon 
Dryden's carelessness in this respect to Wordsworth, who defended 
Dryden.— 5. L. 2. 178. 

^ Histoire 4. 9-10. 



POETIC DICTION IN MODERN TIMES 27 

employes lui faisait dire que "les crocheteurs du Port au 
Foin etaient ses maitres en fait de langage/' ' As Mal- 
herbe sought his language among the 'crocheteurs/ the 
Royal Society in England turned to the language of 'arti- 
sans, country-men, and merchants' for clear and effective 
expression.^ Although the Royal Society was interested in 
the simplification of English prose style for the sake of 
scientific clearness, rather than of artistic beauty, it helped 
to establish a new ideal. The sins of English prose were 
the sins of English verse also; and Sprat's criticism of the 
misuse of ornament in the one was equally applicable to 
the other. 

The ornaments of speech have much degenerated from 
their original use, writes Sprat.- 'They were at first, no 
doubt, an admirable instrument in the hands of wise men ; 
when they were only employed to describe goodness, 
honesty, obedience, in larger, fairer, and more moving 
images, to represent truth clothed with bodies, and to bring 
knowledge back again to our very senses, from whence it 
was at first derived to our understandings. But now they 
are generally changed to worse uses; they are in open 
defiance to reason, professing not to hold much correspond- 
ence with that.' Finding this bad habit of speech utterly 
at variance with all scientific honesty, the Royal Society 
'is most rigorous in putting into execution the only remedy 
that can be found for this extravagance.' Accordingly it 
exacts from all its members a 'close, naked, natural way 
of speaking ; positive expressions, clear senses ; a native 
easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical 
plainness as the}" can; and preferring the language of 
artisans, country-men, and merchants before that of wits 
and scholars.' 

^ The parallel .with the Lyrical Ballads is recognized by Professor 
Raleigh, who comments on the difference in purpose also. — Intro- 
duction to the selections from Sprat, in Craik, English Prose 3. 270. 

^ Spingarn 2. 117-118. 



28 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Of course the language of 'artisans, country-men, and 
merchants' played little part in the verse of Dryden's day; 
but a 'natural way of speaking' was religiously cultivated. 
Every remnant of the older diction which had persisted in 
poetry, but not in the spoken language, was unconditionally 
banished. This vehement objection to words and phrases 
that had become purely literary was due to the causes that 
inspired a similar reform on the part of Wordsworth. By 
a judicious combination of the turns of speech especially 
consecrated to verse, an ignorant or uninspired rhymester 
could conceal his own lack of invention or skill, and could 
fill up a line with something which looked like poetry, but 
was not. The 'dismal slaughter' of this time-honored 
poetic diction is humorously described by Robert Wolseley 
in 1685^: 'The eds went away with the for tos and the 
untils in the general rout that fell on the whole body 
of the thereons, the thereins, and the therehys, when 
those useful expletives, the althos, and those most con- 
venient synalsephas, 'midst, 'mongst, 'gainst, and 'twixt, 
were every one cut off; which dismal slaughter was fol- 
lowed by the utter extirpation of the ancient house of the 
therehys and the therefroms, etc. Nor is this reformation 
the arbitrary fancy of a few who wou'd impose their own 
private opinions and practice upon the rest of their coun- 
trymen, but grounded on the authority of Horace, who tells 
us in his Epistle De Arte Poetica that present use is the 
final judge of language (the verse is too well known to 
need quoting), and on the common reason of mankind, 
which forbids us those antiquated words and obsolete 
idioms of speech whose worth time has worn out, how well 
so ever they may seem to stop a gap in verse and suit our 
shapeless immature conceptions, for what is grown pedantic 
and unbecoming when 'tis spoken will not have a jot the 
better grace for being writ down.'^ 

^ Spingarn 3. 27. 

" Malherbe said that 'ce qui est banni du langage, doit I'etre de 
I'ecriture.'— Petit de Julleville, Histoire 4. 679. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES* 29 

In this attempt to make verse approximate to the spoken 
language, Dryden even goes so far as to object to any 
departure in verse from the normal order of words in 
prose, and particularly condemns a mannerism frequent in 
the Female Vagrant^ in the first volume of Lyrical Ballads — 
the habit of so inverting the order that the rhyme falls on 
the verb. 'And therefore I admire that some men should 
perpetually stumble in a way so easy,' he remarks," 'and, 
inverting the order of words, constantly close their lines 
with verbs, which, though commended sometimes in writ- 
ing Latin, yet we were whipt at Westminster if we used 
it twice together. I know some who, if they were to write 
in blank verse, "Sir, I ask your pardon," would think 
it sounded more heroically to write, "Sir, I your pardon 
ask."3 I should judge him to have little command of 
English whom a necessity of rhyme would force upon this 
rock; though sometimes it cannot easily be avoided; and 
indeed this is the only inconvenience with which rhyme 
can be charged. This is that which makes them say rhyme 
is not natural, it being only so when the poet makes a 
vicious choice of words, or places them, for rhyme's sake, 
so unnaturally as no man would in ordinary speaking ; but 
when it is so judiciously ordered tliat the first word in the 
verse seems to beget the second, and that the next, till that 
becomes the last words in the line which in the negligence 
of prose would be so, it must then be granted that rhyme 
has all the advantages of prose, besides its own/ This 
sounds very much like Wordsworth's suggestion that poetry 

^ No joy to see a neighboring house, or stray- 
Through pastures not his own, the master took; 
My Father dared his greedy wish gainsay. 

— The Female Vagrant, lines 41-43- 
'Keri. 6. 

^But compare the preface to the works of Waller, 1690, which 
expresses the new ideals also. There Waller is praised for giving 
firmness and point to his lines by closing them with verbs, 'in 
which we know the life of language consists.' 



30 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

is only the language of prose with metrical beauty super- 
added, though every reader must be aware of a subtle 
difference which cannot now be defined. 

Although Dryden did not often succeed in preserving the 
order of prose in rhymed couplets, he was careful to do so 
in his blank verse. The result of his attempt may be seen 
in the following passage from Antony's dying speech to 
Cleopatra,^ which has the simplicity and pathos too often 
lacking in Dryden's dramas : 

But grieve not, while thou stayest 

My last disastrous times. 

Think we have had a clear and glorious day, 

And Heav'n did kindly to delay the storm 

Just till our close of evening. Ten years' love, 

And not a moment lost, but all improved 

To the utmost joys, — what ages have we lived! 

And now to die each other's ; and so dying, 

While hand in hand we walk in groves below, 

Whole troops of lovers' ghosts shall flock about us, 

And all the train be ours. 

But Dryden did not accept the ideal of Malherbe without 
question. He made certain modifications which all tended 
in the direction of greater freedom and expressiveness. 
Although Malherbe was content with the speech of the 
'crocheteurs,' he also believed in the abolishment of all 
special terms ; he would employ only so much of the vocab- 
ulary of the porters as was generally intelligible. This, 
of course, was a good principle, but it was subject to 
misinterpretation and abuse. On this account Dryden scorn- 
fully opposed it. Dr. Johnson, the most notable represen- 
tative of this French ideal in England, is forced to devote 
several paragraphs to the refutation of Dryden's statement 
that the use of general terms^ serves only to conceal the 

M// for Love 5. i {Works 5. 432). 

^Of course the type of language opposed to general terms was 
not specific descriptive adjectives, etc., but the cant terms, the 
slang of particular professions. But the phrase was often given a 
wider application. 



POETIC DICTION IN MODERN TIMES 3 1 

poet's ignorance — or, in Wordsworth's phrase, makes it 
unnecessary for him to write with his eye on the object.^ 
'It is a general rule in poetry,' remarks Dr. Johnson, 'that 
all appropriated terms of art should be sunk in general 
expressions, because poetry is to speak a general language. 
. . . Yet Dryden was of the opinion that a sea-fight ought 
to be described in nautical language, and certainly, says 
he, "as those who in a logical disputation keep to general 
terms would hide a fallacy, so those who do it in any poetical 
description would veil their ignorance." ' Dryden adds 
that he is not ashamed to learn something about language 
from sailors.^ Evidently, w^hen he does not write with his 
eye on the object, his sins are not due to his theory of 
poetry, but to other circumstances of which we must speak 
later. 

Besides those modifications in the French practice which 
were due to Dryden's own English common sense, there 
was always a tendency to reaction in favor of the vigor 
and freedom of imaginative expression which character- 
ized the elder poets, and which the moderns were fast 
losing. This was partly responsible for the inconsist- 
ency with which Dryden's criticism was often charged. 
He seemed to find the French ideal somewhat inadequate^; 
and, though he was not the most honorable and admirable 
of men, as far as moral character was concerned, he had a 
kind of intellectual honesty. Real contact with the works 
of his great predecessors, whom he was so ready to refine 

^Dryden (Lives i. 433). Johnson is quoting from the preface to 
the Annus Mirabilis (Ker i. 13). Of course Dryden changed his 
mind on this subject, as he did on most others at some time in his 
Hfe. See Ker, p. xxxiii. 

" 'If I have made some few mistakes, it is only . . . because I 
have wanted opportunity to correct them ; the whole poem being 
first written . . . where I have not so much as the converse of any 
seaman.' — Ker i. 13. 

^ Ker I. 194-195. Note his characteristic remarks on French 
refinement. 'For my part,' he says, 'I desire to be tried by the 
laws of my own country.' 



32 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

and censure/ often led to a temporary reaction against the 
new standard of good sense and regular versification — in 
his defense of poetic license in the preface to the Fall of 
Man, for example, and in his attempt to recapture some 
of the richness of the old blank verse in All for Love. 
There is often a kind of wistfulness, as well as a manly 
and unaffected reverence, in his appreciation of Shake- 
speare and Milton. He was not altogether unconscious of 
the ancient liberty and power which were departing from 
English verse, not to be recovered until the days of Words- 
worth. For the loss of this liberty, and the creation of a 
substitute poetry more obnoxious than all the unpruned 
growths of the metaphysical imagination, Dryden himself 
was responsible, as we shall see; but this was largely the 
indirect result of some deficiencies in his own poetic gifts. 
His precepts, like his most characteristic practice, were in 
favor of that selection of the 'language actually used by 
men' which he called 'plain English.' 

But Dryden's blunt, heedless, vigorous spirit was natu- 
rally inclined to those very sins against which his criticism 
was often directed. He knew how to be simple, and simple 
in so homely and manly a style that one of the first symp- 
toms of the reaction against Pope was a preference for the 
bolder rhythms and plainer language of Dryden.- But he 
did not know how to be polished : 

^Dr. Johnson speaks of Dryden's favorite pleasure of discredit- 
ing his predecessors. Dryden {Lives i. 349)- A similar complaint 
seems to have been made in Dryden's lifetime. 'I am made a de- 
tractor from my predecessors, whom I do confess to have been my 
masters in the art,' he writes. — Ihid. i. 349, note 4. 

"In speaking of the advantage of using simple and homely lan- 
guage, Warton says: 'Dryden often hazarded it, and gave by it a 
secret charm and a natural air to his verses.' As an example, he 
quotes : 

Sir Balaam now, he lives like other folks. 
He takes his chirping pint and cracks his jokes. 
'Live like yourself was now my Lady's word, 
And lo ! two puddings smoked upon the board. 

— Essay 2. 175. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES' 33 

Even copious Dryden wanted or forgot 
The last and greatest art, the art to blot. 

The importation of this somewhat aUen virtue into English 
verse required an artist of more patience and address. 
Such an artist was Pope. He completed the work of 
reforming and refining the literary language by the stand- 
ard of well-bred conversation in England, somewhat as his 
master, Boileau, completed the work of Malherbe in France. 
In his hands the conception of a 'selection of the real 
language of men' lost the more universal character that 
Dryden was inclined to give it, and was more regularly 
associated with the ideal of correctness, and the avoidance 
of everything vulgar. 

Pope, indeed, was just the man to finish such a work, 
after it had been inaugurated by a man of greater intel- 
lectual initiative than he. Although endowed with Uttle 
originality of mind, he was by nature a poet and an artist- 
more of a poet, perhaps, than the world was ever permitted 
to discover, more exclusively an artist than any other Eng- 
Hsh poet. In him the purely artistic impulse seemed to 
predominate over every other. All his joy and ambition 
lay in the skilful adaptation of means to the attainment of 
a desired end. But he readily accepted the end proposed 
to him by others. In an age which emphasized good sense, 
he devoted a lifetime to bringing reason and rhyme 
together.^ When Walsh told him that the only virtue yet 
to be attained in English poetry was the virtue of correct- 
ness, he determined that, before his death, the English 
should boast this virtue also. While poets were struggling 
with an unperfected medium, he demonstrated how bril- 
liantly and easily a mere lad could do what they only 
tried to do. In his hands the couplet was condensed to 
the last degree of condensation, and polished to the highest 
beauty that polish alone can confer. In this delight in 
skill — in the exercise of it, and the fine and astonishing 
results of it— lay the secret of his whole activity. 

^ Preface to the Miscellaneous Works of Pope, 1716. 



34 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

But in all this he really made no original modification of 
what he received from others. The ideal had been com- 
pletely defined before he adopted it. His criticism, much 
more than his poetry, is summed up in his own famous 
words : 'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.' 
His criticism, more than his poetry, we say, because in 
poetry he seems to have possessed a delicate and original 
vein of his own that in a different age might have made 
of him a very different poet. In his willingness to let 
others do his critical thinking for him, he unconsciously 
stifled impulses which might have resulted in something 
besides the most airy and subtly malicious of satires. The 
forms that his imagination took when the carefully clipped 
wings happen to attain to some brief flight — as in the fairy 
machinery of the Rape of the Lock, or the mediaeval back- 
ground of Eloisa and Ahelard — reveal a graceful and 
romantic spirit. He had a gift of pathos, too. Under all 
the glossy language of Eloisa and Abelard and the Elegy 
on the Death of an Unfortunate Lady, there is a real sub- 
stance of pathetic thought. The impression derived from 
these deviations from the normal course of satirical and 
didactic verse is strengthened by numerous instances of his 
romantic taste in his letters, by his lifelong love of the 
Faerie Queene, and by the quality and music of his early 
verses on solitude. Had his artistic ambitions and his 
wonderful skill in imitation been inspired by other models 
than Waller, and Dryden, and Boileau, England might have 
lost a sparkling satirist, and gained a lyrical poet. 

This Wordsworth always realized. To Pope he never 
denied what he denied to Dryden — the possession of the 
true poetic gift. Had Pope trusted more to his native 
genius, and less to the praise which his boyish display in 
the pastorals brought him, said Wordsworth, he could 
never have descended to the position of an immediately 
popular poet. This descent Wordsworth ascribes to his 
boyish inexperience when he began to write, and to his 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES 35 

inordinate love of praise.^ Perhaps it may be as justly 
ascribed to that strong artistic and histrionic instinct 
which led him to take more delight in a character deliber- 
ately adopted or created than in the qualities that were his 
own. Such a disposition is sufficiently obvious in his 
plotting life. 

However this may be, Pope threw all his artistic ambi- 
tion into the perfection of the French ideal already natu- 
ralized in England by Dryden, and partly suggested to Pope 
himself by Boileau. This ideal was the Horatian doctrine 
of a polite and well-bred mean in language as in life. The 
poet must be familiar, but not vulgar,- carefully avoiding 
low and rustic expressions on the one hand, and bombast on 
the other hand, just as a gentleman avoids pomposity and 
constraint of manner without being coarse or awkward, or 
failing to do the right thing at the right time. The pleasant 
ease of the man to the manner born, the elegant and 
unadorned simiplicity of the well-dressed lady — these corre- 
spond in life to the ideal of politeness in literary expres- 
sion. Just as the well-bred man does what the rest of the 
company are doing, quite naturally and gracefully, never 
pretending to invent manners and customs for himself ; so 
the poet must use the language that other people talk, giving 
it only the inconspicuous, yet all-pervading charm of an 
exquisite propriety in the choice and application of it. 
This gentlemanly scorn for unseemly ornament is expressed 
by the youthful Pope in the Essay on Criticism/' 

Words are like leaves ; and where they most abound 
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. 
False eloquence, like the prismatic glass, 
Its gaudy colors spreads on every place ; 

^ Essay Supplcjiientary to the Preface. 

^ 'As there is a difference betwixt simplicity and rusticity, so the 
expression of simple thoughts should be plain, but not clownish.' — 
Preface to the Pastorals. 

'^ Essay on Criticism 319-333. In a letter to Caryll, Pope gives 
expression to his preference for simplicity, in terms that are much 



36 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

The face of Nature we no more survey ; 

All glares alike, without distinction gay. 

But true expression, like the unchanging sun, 

Clears and improves whate'er it shines upon ; 

It gilds all objects, but it alters none. 

Expression is the dress of thought,^ and still 

Appears more decent as more suitable ; 

A vile conceit in pompous words expressed 

Is like a clown in regal purple dressed : 

For different styles with different subjects sort, 

As several garbs with country, town, and court. 

The difference between this ideal of simplicity and that of 
Wordsworth is not easy to define. Like the difference 
between the courtesy of a kindly, well-bred man and the 
passionate gentleness of a Bernard of Clairvaux, it is not 
so much a matter of outward conduct as of degrees of 
intensity and purity in the spirit that suggests and controls 
the outward action. 

In his attempt to attain this urbane simplicity, Pope 
neither spared the file nor shunned the flames that Horace 
so mercilessly recommends to young writers. 'With 
the unwearied application of a plodding Flemish painter, 
who draws a shrimp with the most minute exactness,' says 
Cowper,^ 'he had all the genius of one of the first masters. 
Never, I believe, were such talents and such drudgery 
united.' He found as much pleasure in correcting as in writ- 
more like Wordsworth: 'I have often found by experience that 
nature and truth, though never so low and vulgar, are yet pleasing 
when openly and without artifice represented ; insomuch that it 
would be diverting to me to read the very letters of an infant, could 
it write its innocent inconsistencies and tautologies just as it thought 
them.' — Letters i. 190. 

^ 'Language is the apparel of poesy.' — Sir William Alexander, in 
Spingarn i. 182. 'Language is the dress of thought.' — Dryden {Lives 
I. 58). Wordsworth told DeQuincey that it was highly unphilosophi- 
cal to call language the 'dress of thought' He would call it the 
'incarnation of thought.' 

^ Cowper, Letters 4. 168-169. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES' 37 

ing/ and not in correcting once, but many times. 'After 
writing a poem, one should correct it all over with one single 
view at a time,' he told Spence.- Thus for language, if 
an elQgy, — "these lines are very good, but are they not in 
too heroical a strain?" ' *In translating both the Iliad and 
the Odyssey my usual method was to take advantage of 
the first heat; and then to correct each book, first by 
the original text and then by other translations ; and lastly 
to give it a reading for the versification only.'^ But after 
he had thus used the file, he did not always spare the 
application of the flames. *I have prevented not only many 
mean things from seeing the light, but many which I 
thought tolerable. For what I have published I can only 
hope to be pardoned ; but for what I have burned I deserve 
to be praised.'* 

The result of this unwearied effort was that, within the 
sphere which he had made his own, he set an example of 
fine and conscientious wordmanship that might be applied 
with advantage to other types of poetry. But this sphere 
was a very limited one. When he carried the ideal of 
'what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed' outside 
of the field of experience of which he himself was a proper 
judge, the badness of the thought or the lack of thought 
was made only more pernicious by that polished grace with 
which he uttered it. Nothing could be more different, for 
instance, than Pope's 'interiors' and his 'landscapes' — to 
borrow terms from painting. The simplicity, the exact- 
ness, the use of familiar and specific terms to designate 
familiar and specific things, in the first, are only equaled 
by the glossy vagueness of the second. As an example of 
this difference we may compare the reference to 

^ 'I corrected because it was as pleasant for me to correct as to 
write.' — Preface to the Miscellaneous Works of Pope 1716. 
"^ Spence' s Anecdotes, p. 270. 

* Ibid., p. 23, 

* Preface to the Miscellaneous Works. 



38 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

The darksome pines that o'er yon rocks reclined 

Wave high, and murmur to the hollow wind, 

The wandering streams that shine between the hills, 

The grots that echo to the tinkling rills. 

The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze,^ etc. 

with the following; 

In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung, 
The floor of plaister, and the walls of dung. 
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw, 
With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw. 
The George and Garter dangling from the bed 
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, 
Great Villiers lies.^ 

If, as Joseph Warton said, with a disapproving glance at 
some of Pope's work, 'The use, the force, and the excellence 
of language certainly consists in raising clear, complete, 
and circumstantial images, and in turning readers into 
spectators,'^ Pope often succeeds in writing very forcibly 
and excellently. It is in this malicious choice and assemblage 
of specific and characteristic circumstances, in the airy 
simplicity with which he calls a spade a spade, that his 
power as a satirist lies. This power, of which he gives so 
few illustrations in landscape and ideal 'historical' painting, 
is always conspicuous in his genre pictures. He does not 
name or characterize the blossoms in a 'flowery mead'; 
but he does name the contents of Belinda's toilet-table. 
The tasks of the shepherds in the pastorals are indicated in 
the vaguest terms, but the game of cards in the Rape of the 
Lock is described in all its complicated technical details. 
In Wordsworth's pathetic use of 'natural little circum- 
stances' in his narrative of the ruined cottage, he is put- 
ting to nobler uses the art of being specific which he 
might have learned from Pope, or from Pope's disciple, 
Goldsmith. 

^ Eloisa to Ahelard 155-160. 
'Moral Essays 3. 299-305. 
^ Essay 2. 165. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES' 39 

This enormous difference in Pope's style when he is deal- 
ing with different types of subject-matter suggests the real 
origin and character of the poetic diction to which 
Wordsworth objected. It also shows how inseparably the 
new style of the Lyrical Ballads was connected with a new 
poetic substance. As long as Dryden and Pope were deal- 
ing with their own proper material — the life that they 
themselves knew — there is little in their style or their theory 
of style that is in essential disagreement with that of 
Wordsworth. They were quite as insistent as he upon the 
necessity of writing as unaffected persons talk, and of avoid- 
ing all special literary diction. In emphasizing this, they 
rendered a permanent service to English style by establish- 
ing a literary standard of grammar and syntax which really 
corresponded to the normal structure of the spoken English 
sentence. It is this clear and natural structure that makes 
Dryden's prose seem modern. It gives an appearance of 
ease and lucidity to the vaguest and most periphrastic verse 
of the century. One reason why Wordsworth, with all his 
natural tendency to involved and peculiar syntax, can 
write so clearly, is that the despised eighteenth century had 
preceded him, and had not preached grammar and correct- 
ness for a hundred years for nothing. An excellent clear- 
ness and simplicity of diction, as well as of grammar, are 
characteristic of Pope's generation. Toward the end of 
the century Cowper, complaining that 'simplicity is become 
a very rare quality in a writer,' remarks^ : 'Swift and 
Addison were simple; Pope knew how to be so, but was 
frequently tinged with affectation ; since their day I hardly 
know" a celebrated winter who deserves the character.' At 
another time, in words which anticipate Coleridge's defini- 
tion of Wordsworth's ideal, he writes-: 'To make verse 
speak the language of prose without being prosaic — to 
marshal the words of it in such an order as they might 

^ Cowper, Letters 4. z^2>- 
'Ibid. 4. 176. 



40 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary 
speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, 
and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of 
rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can under- 
take. He that could accomplish this task was Prior.' 
Where could we turn for better examples of verse which 
speaks the language of prose without losing its own proper 
charm, than to the beginning of the eighteenth century — 
to the sparkling hons mots of Pope, the colloquial negligence 
of Prior, the naivete and occasional tenderness of Gay, and 
even the 'close, naked, natural way of speaking' that Swift 
carried into rhyme from his prose? But beyond their own 
limited field their taste and imagination become less sure, 
and various elements corrupt the bright simplicity. 

In the first place, there is the universal ignorance of or 
indifference to natural phenomena, combined with the artistic 
ambition to do what other poets had done before them, and 
do it better. The beauty of the external world has always 
held an important place in poetry, because men in general 
are interested in it. Storm and sunshine, the clouds and 
the stars above our heads, and the familiar flowers at our 
feet, have been the universal and permanent background of 
all human experience, and are inevitably associated with 
the memory and expression of it. Poets sing the 'glories 
of the rolling year' as naturally as we all begin a social 
conversation with a remark about the weather. Hence a 
generation which was interested in writing good and effec- 
tive verse, but whose own experience was mainly associated 
with the streets of London, naturally made use of this 
traditional matter of poetry; but, since it was used as a 
traditional element for the sake of an artistic effect, and was 
not brought to the test of experience by either the writer 
or the reader, the consequence was that the style in 
which these things were described was usually affected by 
the lack of genuine knowledge and feeling behind the style. 
Sometimes, when Wordsworth condemns the language of 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES* 41 

his predecessors, he is referring only to the falsity of the 
substance. It is as easy to tell a lie in the language of the 
lower and middle classes as in the language of the court. 
Bad descriptions of nature were not always written in 
phraseology in itself gaudy and inane. 

This, perhaps, is true of the famous description by 
Dryden w^hich Wordsworth particularly condemns^ : 

All things are hushed as Nature's self lay dead ; 
The mountains seem to nod the drowsy head. 
The little birds in dreams their songs repeat, 
And sleeping flowers beneath the night dews sweat. 
Even Lust and Envy sleep ; yet Love denies 
Rest to my soul, and slumber to my eyes." 

Here is no poetic diction. The language is simple, con- 
crete, and touching. The only trouble is that it does not 
tell the truth. No one who ever really saw the solemn 
outlines of the mountains at night could write or enjoy the 
second verse. Yet the lines are, in some respects, so 
artistic that it is not difficult to see how such writing as 
this could lull not exceedingly vigilant powers of observation 
to sleep along with the drowsy mountains, and could 
encourage lesser mortals to imitate the falsehood, where 
they could not rival the art. Just as the moonlight on our 
gaudy modern stage, flooding trees and flowers that are 
like no trees and flowers that ever grew, somehow produces 
an effect analogous to that produced by the peace and sil- 
very beauty of actual moonlight, so these words suggest 
the quiet and loneliness of the sleeping w^orld. The effect 
of any given passage depends on much besides the truth 
of the separate details. The cadence, the associations of 
the words, the various arts of repetition and emphasis, have 
all their own share in the general impression. In this case, 
for instance, the mind under the spell of the soft flow of 
the metre and the refrain-like recurrence of the word sleep 

^ Essay Supplementary to the Preface. 

^ The Indian Emperor 3. 2 {Works i. 360). 



42 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

and its synonyms, is as little inclined to question the 
drowsiness of the mountains as it is to inquire how these 
plural mountains came to be provided with only one head. 
It is only a counterfeit poetry, cheating the unwary ; but it 
has an artful appearance of 'nature and simplicity.' 

But Dryden himself seems to have been unable to dis- 
tinguish the genuine metal of poetry from the gilded sub- 
stitute, at least in his own productions — as a glance at the 
example of imaginative boldness that he cites in the Pre- 
face to the Fall of Man will show.^ His critical instinct 
was right, but his imaginative feeling was not. *I admire 
his talents and genius highly,' wrote Wordsworth to Scott,^ 
when Scott was getting out his edition of Dryden, 'but 
his is not a poetical genius.^ The only qualities I can find 
in Dryden that are essentially poetical are a certain ardor 
and impetuosity of mind with an excellent ear. It may 
seem strange that I do not add to this great command of 
language; that he certainly has, and of such language too, 
as it is most desirable that a poet should possess, or rather 
that he should not be without. But it is not language that 
is, in the highest sense of the word, poetical, being neither 
of the imagination nor of the passions — I mean of the 
amiable, the ennobling, or the intense passions. I do not 
mean to say that there is nothing of this in Dryden, but as 
little, I think, as is possible considering how much he has 

^ He cites the following as his o.wn most successful attempt to 
imitate the imaginative boldness of Milton : 

Seraph and cherub, careless of their charge, 
And wanton, in full ease now live at large : 
Unguarded leave the passes of the sky, 
And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie. 
This, he says, is imitated from Virgil : Invadunt iirheni, somno 
vinoque sepultam. 'A city's being buried is just as proper an occa- 
sion as an angel's being dissolved in ease and songs of triumph!' — 
Ker I. i88. 
'L. W. F. I. 208-210. 

^ Wordsworth agrees with Milton, who said Dryden was a good 
rhymist, but no poet. — Preface to Newton's Milton, p. 8. 



POETIC DICTION IN ^MODERN TIMES' 43 

written. You will easily understand my meaning when I 
refer to his versification of Palamon and Arcite,^ as com- 
pared with the language of Chaucer. Dryden has neither 
a tender heart nor a lofty sense of moral dignity. When- 
ever his language is poetically impassioned, it is mostly on 
unpleasing subjects, such as the follies, vices, and crimes 
of men or of individuals. That his cannot be the language 
of imagination must have necessarily followed from this : 
that there is not a single image from nature in the whole 
body of his works; and in his translation from Virgil, 
whenever Virgil can be fairly said to have his eye on the 
object, Dryden always spoils the passage.'^ Although 
Dryden was not essentially a poet, his energy and even 
grandeur of mind, the natural swiftness and fire which 
wxre really intellectual qualities, but which often simulated 
the glow of real passion, together with a remarkable facil- 
ity, enabled him to produce an excellent substitute for 
poetry. This seemed to be quite satisfactory to an age 

^ Wordsworth's statement may be illustrated by comparing the 
lines, 

Arcite, false traytour wikke ! 
Now arto.w hent, that lovest my lady so, 
For whom that I have al this peyne and wo, 
And art my blood, and to my counseil sworn, 
****** 
I wol be deed, or elles thou shalt dye, 
Thou shalt not love my lady Emelye, 

with Dryden's version, where struggling tenderness has wholly given 

way to self-complacent and oratorical wrath : 

False traitor, Arcite, traitor to thy blood. 

Bound by thy sacred oath to seek my good. 

Now art thou found forsworn for Emily, 

And darest attempt her love for whom I die. 
****** 

Hope not, base man. unquestioned hence to go, 
For I am Palamon, thy mortal foe. 
"As an illustration of this compare Aineid 4. 522-527 with Dry- 
den's version. 



44 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

which had lost the old gift of song, and was cutting itself 
off from the springs of imaginative feeling in nature and 
common life. 

It was due to this natural lack of at least one type of 
imaginative feeling, rather than to any theory of poetic 
diction, that Dryden became the creator of the elegances 
and flowers of speech so dear to the heart of the eigh- 
teenth century, so obnoxious to the taste of the nineteenth. 
As far as can be discovered from his numerous prefaces, 
his only purpose with respect to language was to give as 
clear and correct and melodious a reproduction of the cur- 
rent speech as possible. If his ambition occasionally soared 
higher, it showed itself only in the wistful effort to write 
with some of the splendor and spirit of his less refined 
predecessors. Hence the falsity of such a description as 
that just quoted seems to be due to some unconscious blind- 
ness, rather than to deliberate intention. The same is true 
of the elegant phrases which Dr. Johnson takes to represent 
a new achievement in verse. Most of them are singularly 
uninteresting; but, for some reason, they took hold of the 
poetical imagination of his successors. For instance, there 
is the adjective 'watery.' 'To him the ocean is a "watery 
desert," a "watery deep," a "watery plain," a "watery 
way," a "watery reign." The shore is a "watery brink," 
or a "watery strand." Fish are a "watery line," or a 
"watery race." Sea-birds are a "watery fowl." The 
launching of ships is a "watery war." Streams are 
"watery floods." Waves are "watery ranks." The word 
occurs with wearisome iteration in succeeding poets.'^ 
Such mannerisms seem to be due to the heedlessness of 
a man writing with great facility, but ignorant of, or indif- 
ferent to, the phenomena he mentions. He seizes upon the 
most obvious, and, at the same time, the most matter-of-fact 
and uninteresting detail, and then, when he perceives the 

^Myra Reynolds, The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry, 
P- 39. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES' 45 

necessity for varying his expression, he acts hke the clever 
writer that he is rather than the sympathetic observer that 
he is not: instead of mentioning a new detail, he merely 
thinks of a synonym for the expression that he has already 
used. In this way all the tiresome array of stock phrases 
that mean nothing came into being. Most of them ring 
monotonous changes upon the most obvious features of 
things, such as the fact that the ocean is composed of 
water, that birds have feathers and fish have fins. To call 
fish the 'finny race' is not to say anything new or interest- 
ing about them ; to vary the expression to the 'scaly tribe' 
is only to make matters worse. Yet it is easy to see that 
all these atrocities might be produced, with no intention of 
thus distinguishing poetry from prose, by any man who was 
trying to write well without knowing what he was talking 
about. In fact, the same kind of diction occurs in prose 
which attempts to deal with the same kind of subject- 
matter. 

These two characteristics of Dryden's treatment of 
natural phenomena — the perversion of the facts for the 
sake of heightening a single impression, and the use of set 
phrases indicating, as Wordsworth said, nothing more than 
the knowledge that a blind man could pick up concerning 
the familiar but ever-changing aspects of Nature — these 
vicious tendencies were also strengthened by the gallantry 
of Waller and his imitators, who made all the mighty 
powers of earth and sky subservient to the glory of some 
fair lady or some all-powerful nobleman. 

In praising Chloris, moons, and stars, and skies, 

Are quickly made to match her face and eyes — 

And gold and rubies, with as little care, 

To fit the color of her lips and hair; 

And, mixing suns, and flowers, and pearl, and stones, 

Make them serve all complexions at once.^ 

'At the death of any illustrious man or fair lady all nature 
was convulsed with grief. When Cselestia died the rivu- 

' Butler, Satire on a Bad Poet; quoted by Miss Reynolds, p. 31. 



46 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

lets were flooded by the tears of the water-gods, the brows 
of the hills were furrowed by new streams, the heavens 
wept, sudden damps overspread the plains, the lily hung its 
head, and birds drooped their wings. When Amaryllis had 
informed nature of the death of Amyntas, all creation 
"began to roar and howl with horrid yell." When Thomas 
Gunston died just before he had finished his seat at New- 
ington, Watts declared that the curling vines would in grief 
untwine their amorous arms, the stately elms would drop 
leaves for tears, and that even the unfinished gates and 
buildings would weep. In love-poetry nature is frequently 
represented as abashed and discomfited before the superior 
charms of some fair nymph. Aurora blushes when she sees 
cheeks more beauteous than her own. Lilies wax pale with 
envy at a maiden's fairness. When bright Ophelia comes, 
liUes droop and roses die before their lofty rival. So the 
sun, when he sees the beautiful ladies in Hyde Park, 

Sets in blushes and conveys his fires 
To distant lands. 

And when that modest luminary is aware of the presence 
of the fair Maria, he 

Seems to descend with greater care ; 

And, lest she see him go to bed, 

In blushing clouds conceals his head. 

Nature is thus constantly compelled into admiring submis- 
sion to some Delia or Phyllis or Chloris. Even further 
than this do the poets go. They make all the beauty of 
nature a direct outcome of the lady's charms. In the gar- 
dens at Penshurst the peace and glory of the alleys was 
given by Dorothea's more than human grace. No spot 
could resist the civilizing effect of her beauty. 
The extravagance of speech stood as the sign of an inten- 
sity of feeling that did not exist. The poet was not swept 
away by overwhelming passion. He worked out his verses 
with conscious deliberation. A lady-love was one of the 



POETIC DICTION IN MODERN TIMES 47 

necessary poetical stage-properties, so the poet cast about 
him for a PhylHs or an Amoret, and then cast about him 
for sometliing to say to her. Such Hnes as Waller's on 
Dorothea, who is so much admired by the plants that 

If she sit down, with tops all tow'rds her bow'd, 
They round about her into arbours crowd : 
Or if she walks in even ranks they stand, 
Like some well marshalled and obsequious band, 

are at once felt to be merely cold, tasteless hyperbole. The 
lines do not win a second's suspension of disbelief. Modes 
of speech, a conception of nature, such that high-wrought 
emotion might justify it, or that might be natural and 
inevitable when the poet's thought was ruled by a living 
mythology, became mere frigid conventionalities when 
there was no passion, and when the spirits of stream and 
wood no longer won even poetic faith. '^ This easy method 
of praising a mistress is also humorously described by 
Ambrose Philips : 

To blooming Phyllis I a song compose, 
And, for a rhyme, compare her to a Rose ; 
Then, while my fancy works, I write down Morn, 
To paint the blush that doth her cheek adorn, 
And, when the whiteness of her skin I show, 
With extasy bethink myself of Snow. 
Thus, without pains, I tinkle in the close. 
And sweeten into verse insipid prose." 

As long as these exaggerations were confined to the 
celebration of fair ladies they had perhaps some artistic 
justification. No doubt the poet knew that he was not 
telling the truth; and most certainly the lady knew it. 
Even the reader was in the secret. It was all a poetic fic- 
tion, a graceful convention, and imposed on no one. As 
such, the poet was entitled to vary and elaborate it as 

^ Myra Reynolds, The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry, 
PP- 33-35- 
^ Ambrose Philips, quoted by Miss Reynolds, p. 32. 



48 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

cleverly as he could. But this easy manipulation of all the 
mighty frame of Heaven and earth, of the changeless stars 
and the wayward winds, to suit the purposes of every 
gallant poetaster, served, like Dryden's rhetoric about the 
'drowsy mountains,' to cultivate an indifference to the 
facts. Scribblers soon fell into the way of telling the same 
kind of falsehoods when there was no reason for so doing, 
and this despite their inability to do it as cleverly as their 
unscrupulous masters — though perhaps they did not know 
that. We shall have an example of the ridiculous results 
of this habit later. 

But meanwhile it is obvious that, in all this fine writing, 
dulness of vision is often matched by deadness of heart. 
And this brings us to Wordsworth's second indictment 
against the language of the period. It is heartless, he 
says. Here again the real fault is something greater and 
deeper than the choice of a certain type of vocabulary ; but 
it resulted, almost unconsciously, or at least unintentionally, 
in the habits of speech that became poetic diction. 
Uncontrolled by a true sensitiveness of heart, the language 
of passion (which is the language of poetry) suffered the 
same fate that attended the natural imagery. As the clever 
writer varied his descriptions, not by adding a new detail, 
but by finding a new synonym, so he varied the metaphor- 
ical delineation of feeling, not by recurring to the original 
emotion, but by finding parallel and analogous expressions 
for what had already been said by himself or some other 
poet. It was a process of building bricks without straw. 
When he did go abroad for his material, he naturally went 
to the writers that preceded him, especially to the Latin 
writers. There he could find the best material from 
Nature already selected and arranged — poetically pre- 
digested, as it were. Why should he confuse himself, and 
waste time and energy, re-examining the original crude 
and unmethodized source, when poets that he could trust 
had already done so, and had reported upon what they had 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES* 49 

seen? Why should he not devote his talents to improving 
the use of what they had chosen ? To us Blair's statement^ 
that Milton's U Allegro and // Penseroso were storehouses 
of natural imagery from which all later poets had drawn, 
immediately suggests the question: But why did they not 
go to the greater storehouse that lay at their very doors? 
Why did they not merely do as Milton had done — take a 
walk some fine morning, and tell what they saw? How 
could they dream of assuming the dignity of poets merely 
by 'descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations 
borrowed from imitations, by traditions, imagery and 
hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme and volubility 
of syllables.' But, after all, the fault lay neither with the 
habit of "imitation, nor with the laudable ambition to write 
well from which this habit proceeded. Pope's Imitations of 
Horace are not lacking in originality or appropriate sim- 
plicity of language. Within their own proper field all these 
ideals of expression, which we are so ready to condemn, 
worked excellently. The fact that the poets of the age 
were less successful in tlie wider fields beyond was partly 
their fault, but partly also their misfortune. When they 
ventured away from the familiar streets and polite circles 
of London, they left behind them 'the hearing ear and the 
seeing eye,' and the feeling heart also. And without these 
even the standards of Wordsworth would be useless. 

To the type of diction that inevitably developed where 
poets lacked the touchstone of personal observation and 
genuine feeling. Pope made some special contributions of 
his own. Since he really had a better eye for natural 
beauty, and more romantic tenderness of feeling, than some 
of his predecessors, his imagery is often more exact, and his 
language of passion less frigid than theirs. In him we 
rarely find the shameless and absolute prevarications of 
which Dr}^den and Waller were capable. Yet his sins in 
this respect were bad enough. His motto — which, to fit his 

^ Blair, Essays on Rhetoric, p. 319. 



50 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

case, may be varied to 'What oft was tried, but ne'er so 
well performed' — often led him to commit all the sins of 
his age. The result is a singular unevenness. In one line 
of the Pastorals he remarks, quite gracefully and simply,^ 
'Now hawthorns blossom and now daisies spring'; in 
another he inanely announces^: 

The turf with rural dainties shall be crown'd, 
While opening blooms diffuse their sweets around. 

In Windsor Forest we find such couplets as these^ : 

See Pan with flocks, with fruit Pomona crown'd, 
Here blushing Flora paints the enamell'd ground. 
Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand, 
And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand. 

But these are shortly followed by descriptions of tolerable 
concreteness :* 

See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs, 

And mounts exulting on triumphant wings : 

Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound. 

Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground. 

Ah ! what avail his glossy varying dyes. 

His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes. 

The vivid green his shining plumes unfold. 

His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold? 

But, even in the passage where he is employing this more 
concrete language, we notice an artificiality in the style, 
which proves, upon closer analysis, to consist mainly in 
the habit of balancing one half of the line against the 
other. 'Now hawthorns blossom' exactly balances 'now 
daisies spring' ; 'See Pan with flocks' is paralleled by 'with 
fruit Pomona crown'd'; and 'his purple crest' is paired 
with 'scarlet-circled eyes.' This antithesis is often 
achieved at the expense of triith and grammar. 'I could 

^ Spring 42. 

"" Ihid. 99-100. 

^ Windsor Forest 37-40. 

* Ibid. 111-118. 



POETIC DICTION IN MODERN TIMES 5 1 

never get the blockhead to study his grammar/ said Swift. 
In tlie Hne, 'See Pan with flocks, with fruit Pomona 
crown'd', he suggests that Pan is crowned with flocks. 

Even Eloisa has enough self-possession for a few neat 
antitheses. *I mourn the lover, not lament his fault,* she 
says, adding very shortly:^ 

How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot ! 
The world forgetting, by the world forgot: 
Eternal sunshine on the spotless mind ! 
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resign d; 
Labor and rest that equal periods keep ; 
Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep ; 
Desires composed, affections ever even; 
■ Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to heaven. 

This mannerism was emphatically condemned by Words- 
worth as one of the worst features of the style of Pope: 
'These intellectual operations (while they can be conceived 
of as operations of the intellect at all, for in fact one half of 
the process is mechanical, words doing their own work and 
one half of the line manufacturing the rest) remind me of 
the motions of a posture master, or of a man balancing a 
sword upon his finger which must be kept from falling at 
all hazards. . . . Why was not this simply expressed 
without playing with tlie reader's fancy, to the delusion and 
dishonour of his understanding, by a trifling epigrammatic 
point ?'- 

When to the regular antitheses and epigrammatic points 
of Pope were added the flowers and elegances of speech 
already invented by Dryden and Waller, and when the 
unscrupulous falsification of the obvious facts of nature 
was encouraged by a popular objection to everything 'vul- 
gar,' the poetic diction which Wordsworth was later to 

"^ Eloisa to Abelard 207-212, 

'"^ See Wordsworth's detailed analysis of an epitaph by Pope, 
in Upon Epitaphs, Part 2, Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, pp. 
1 18-122. 



52 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

abolish was already fairly well developed. But the theory 
of it was not. While it was everywhere stated that poetry 
must be refined, there is, with the single exception of a 
notable utterance by Addison, to be quoted later, virtually 
no evidence for belief that verse should be distinguished 
from prose, or from cultivated conversation of the same 
'refined' type, by a special vocabulary or licenses of gram- 
mar and syntax. In 1700 Wordsworth's declaration that 
there neither is nor ever can be any essential difference 
between the language of prose and the language of verse 
would probably have seemed less strange than it seemed 
in 1800. 

As far as difference was recognized, it is the difference 
that Wordsworth himself was willing to concede. Poetry, 
being the language of passion, naturally reproduces the 
peculiarities of emotional speech in a freer syntax and 
order of words, and in a more highly figurative expression, 
than is necessary in prose. This was especially emphasized, 
though not happily illustrated, by Dryden,^ who derived his 
ideas from Longinus, and by John Dennis, who, more than 
any other critic of the time, often anticipates Wordsworth's 
point of view. 

One other distinction was commonly made : poetry, even 
more than prose, must speak a general language, a lan- 
guage intelligible to all. A failure to perceive in what 
the universality of language consists led to the monstrous 
doctrine that poetry must employ only general terms. 
This principle, so unhappily applied in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, was later adopted by Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
with very different results, as we shall see. 

Moreover, criticism in the early eighteenth century was 
not wholly blind to the merits of a simplicity that was 
not also refined. Steele liked the directness and concrete- 
ness of unlearned colloquial speech^ ; Addison remarks that 

'Ker I. 185-186. 

~ Guardian 23. Cf. Hamelius, Die Kritik in der Englischen 
Literatitr des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, p. 99. 



POETIC DICTION IN MODERN TIMES 53 

there is more in common between the plain language of the 
popular ballads and the majestic simplicity of Virgil, than 
between the style of Virgil and that of such fanciful writers 
as Cowley^ ; Pope thinks that he would like even the style 
of an infant if it could write down its thoughts with all 
their innocent redundancies just as they come-; Swift 
doubts the wisdom of the boasted reform of the language 
after the Restoration, and thinks that only the influence of 
the Bible and the Prayer Book upon the speech of the simple 
people keeps the English tongue from utter degeneracy.^ 
These are only temporary reactions, perhaps, but they are 
not without significance. 

Hence it may be seen that the criticism of the period 
was not the source of the false ideals which Wordsworth 
and Coleridge were later to combat. The age of Pope did 
not develop the conception of a special language for poetry, 
although it almost unconsciously produced such a language. 
For the theory of a special diction for poetry we must 
search among the confused and various utterances of the 
generation succeeding Pope, and almost unconsciously 
beginning to react against him. 

2. The Reaction Against Pope. 

In the period between the publication of Paradise Lost 
and the appearance of the Seasons, the criticism and the 
practice of poetry had been of a definite and self-consistent 
character. To draw positive conclusions concerning it is 
not difficult. But this can hardly be said of the rest of 
the century. There is a breaking up of the old criticism, 
v.'ithout a very definite formulation of a new. The only 
notable exception to this statement is Joseph Warton's Essay 
on the Genius and Writings of Pope. Warton stands 

^ Spectator 70. 
^Letters i. 190. 

^A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the 
English Tongue {The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift 2. 15). 



54 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

fairly and squarely for an ideal of poetic expression in all 
essential respects different from the practice, if not from 
the criticism, of the early eighteenth century; and his 
brave rebellious remarks in 1756 become the source of the 
most vital discussion of poetic style for the next fifty years, 
and lead directly to the reform of Wordsworth. But the 
opinions of the other critics are more difficult to classify. 
Doctor Johnson, the great exponent of the so-called classical 
ideal, is as loud in his objection to the 'exploded deities' 
of Greece and Rome as he is Latinized in vocabulary ; and 
he insists upon a respect for the usual grammar and forms 
of spoken discourse in verse as warmly as he defends the 
use of general terms, and the elegances and flowers of 
speech. Johnson's disciple. Goldsmith, recommends the 
heroic couplet and the device of personification,^ while all 
his own natural sympathies and his own practice are in 
favor of a pathetic and even homely simplicity unknown to 
the polished generation of Pope, to which he looks back 
with some regret. On the other hand. Gray, 'who was at 
the head of those who, by their reasonings have attempted 
to widen the space of separation betwixt prose and metrical 
composition,'^ was also the centre of a new and regenera- 
tive influence which revealed itself in a more picturesque 
imagery, and a free and beautiful cadence; in the later 
poetry of the century. 

Since this is so, it will be well simply to quote the notable 
individual utterances on poetic diction, and then proceed 
to examine the result of the rather chaotic ideals of the 
century as revealed in the average verse of Wordsworth's 
own time — the sort of verse that was appearing in the 
magazines of 1796. 

Since the 'poetic diction' of the English Augustan age 
was the outcome of the practice, rather than the deliberate 
theories, of Dryden and his followers, the expression of the 

^ On Metaphors (Works i. 373). 
^ Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES 55 

new ideal consisted mainly in an attack upon the verse of 
Pope, and the formulation of principle opposed to his prac- 
tice — in Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of 
Pope. This essay is the immediate source of some of 
Wordsworth's most famous remarks. Warton goes to the 
heart of the matter at once^ : 'All I plead for is ... to 
impress on the reader that a clear head and acute under- 
standing are not sufficient alone to make a poet; that the 
most solid observations on human life, expressed w^ith the 
utmost elegance and brevity, are morality, and not poetry; 
that the epistles of Boileau in rhyme are no more poetical 
than the character of La Bruyere in prose; and that it is 
the creative and glowing imagination, acer spiritus ac vis, 
and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted 
and very uncommon character which so few possess, and of 
which so few can properly judge.' 

Having thus suggested where Pope belongs, Warton 
proceeds to point out the falsity of most of the contem- 
porary descriptions of external nature. It is strange that 
in the pastorals of a young poet there should not be 'one 
rural image that is new,'^ but this, he fears, must be said of 
Pope.^ With Pope's treatment of the seasons he compares 
that of Thomson^: 'Thomson was blessed with a strong 
and copious fancy ; he hath enriched poetry with a variety 
of new and original images, which he painted from nature 
itself, and from his own actual observations; his descrip- 
tions have, therefore, a distinctness and truth, w^hich are 
utterly wanting to those of poets who have only copied 
from each other, and have never looked abroad on the 

^ Essay i. iv-v. 

^Cf. Wordsworth, Essay Supplementary to the Preface: 'Now it 
is remarkable that, excepting the Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Win- 
chelsea, and a passage in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of 
the period between the publication of Paradise Lost and the Seasons 
does not contain a single new image from external nature.' 

^ Essay i. 2. 

* Ibid. I. 41-47- 



56 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

objects themselves. Thomson was accustomed to wander 
away into the country for days and for weeks, attentive to 
"each rural sight, each rural sound," while many a poet who 
has dwelt for years on the Strand has attempted to describe 
fields and rivers, and generally succeeded accordingly. 
Hence that nauseous repetition of the same circumstances ; 
hence that disgusting impropriety of introducing what may 
be called a set of hereditary images, without proper regard 
to the age, or climate, or occasion in which they were 
formerly used. ... If our poets would accustom 
themselves to contemplate fully every object before they 
attempted to describe it, they would not fail of giving their 
readers more new images than they generally do.'^ 

Not only does he object to the falsity and vagueness of 
imagery in the poetry of the eighteenth century ; he is also 
disposed to scoff at stilted refinement, and to recommend 
language more natural and touching. He praises as 
'pathetic to the last degree' the lines from Jane Shore: 

Why dost thou fix thy dying eyes upon me 
With such an earnest, such a piteous look, 
As if thy heart were full of some sad meaning 
Thou couldst not speak, 

adding that the few words, 'Forgive me, hut forgive me' 
in this play exceed the most pompous declamation of Cato.^ 
Of course Warton's criticism was not only the cause but 
the effect of a change in taste. Everywhere there were 
indications of this change — of an increasing interest in 
nature and common life and the romantic past beyond the 
age of refinement. Almost all the poetry of note in the 
generation preceding Wordsworth heralded his coming, and 
gave the impulse to his genius. But Joseph Warton is 
especially noteworthy, as clearly and distinctly formulating 

^ Cf. Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: 'I have at all 
times endeavored to look steadily at my subject; consequently 
there is, I hope, in these poems little falsehood of description.' 

^ Essay i. 273-274. 



POETIC DICTION IN MODERN TIMES 57 

the new ideal which was variously illustrated in the poems 
of Thomson, Goldsmith, Cowper, and even Gray. 

Warton's good work was carried on by a much less intel- 
ligent person — John Scott of Amwell, who is of interest 
to us because his Essays were read by Wordsworth in his 
youth. Although his remarks are vitiated by a rather 
undiscriminating emphasis on what he believes to be 'cor- 
rectness,' he insists, even more earnestly than Warton, on 
clear and characteristic imagery; and he has no mercy on 
the old periphrastic diction. 'Blushing Flora,' he says,^ 
'is the quaint and indistinct language of a schoolboy; for 
why Flora should blush no good reason has ever been 
discovered.' 

But while the criticism was thus undermining the influ- 
ence of the poetic diction, the conception of a special 
usage for poetry, v/hich had been incidentally suggested 
by Addison, began to become widespread. 



J. Theories of Poetic Diction. 

The theory of a special diction for poetry was the result 
of the emphasis placed by Dryden and Pope upon the selec- 
tive power of the poet, and upon the value of imitation. 
The poet must employ the current speech, but he must also 
avoid everything vulgar or unintelligibly specific. More- 
over, he was permitted, even advised, to incorporate into his 
verse the happiest inspirations of his predecessors. The 
result was the development of the notion that there is a 
special language of poetry — a treasure of fine phrases 
descending from bard to bard, and especially consecrated 
to the uses of the imagination. In general, the term poetic 
diction was applied only to these 'happy combinations' of 
words. Transpositions of words from the order of prose, 
the coining of new words, the use of strange forms, etc., 

^ Essays on the Writings of Several English Poets, p. 72. 



58 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

were all condemned by men like Dr. Johnson and Gold- 
smith, who represent the purest classical ideal in this 
respect, and whose criticism is echoed in the reviews of 
Wordsworth's day. 

But there was a less popular conception of the special 
language of poetry which permitted a slight departure from 
the strictness of prose in the matter of vocabulary and 
syntax, provided this did not obscure the intelligibility of 
the verse. Of this conception Addison's analysis of the 
style of Milton, according to the standards of Aristotle, is 
perhaps the best example. 

Hence there arose two types of poetic diction, represent- 
ing the classic and the romantic traditions — if we may em- 
ploy those vague but convenient terms. The one, imitat- 
ing the example of Dryden and Pope, retained the grammar 
and syntax, and, for the most part, the vocabulary of prose, 
but employed the happy combinations of words recom- 
mended by Dr. Johnson ; the other, imitating Milton and 
Spenser, the poetic models in the reaction against Pope, 
rejected the phrases and versification of the heroic couplet, 
but made use of the old words and 'licentious transposi- 
tions' so emphatically condemned by Dr. Johnson and 
the reviewers. The various modifications of this ideal of 
a special language for poetry may be seen in the following 
typical quotations: 

I. Addison^: If clearness and perspicuity were only to be con- 
sulted, the poet would have nothing else to do but to clothe his 
thoughts in the most plain and natural expressions. But since it 
often happens that the most obvious phrases, and those which are 
used in ordinary conversation, become too familiar to the ear, 
and contract a kind of meanness by passing through the mouths of 
the vulgar, a poet should take particular care to guard himself 
against idiomatic ways of speaking. . . . Milton has but few fail- 
ings in this kind, of which, however, you may meet with some 
instances, as in the following passages : 

^ Criticisms of Paradise Lost, ed. Cook, pp. 21-23. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES 59 

Embryos and idiots, idiots and friars, 

White, black, and gray, with all their trumpery 

Here pilgrims roam. 



A while discourse they hold, 

No fear lest dinner coo/— when thus began 

Our author. 



Who of all ages to succeed, but feeling 
The evil on him brought by me, will curse 
My head? Ill fare our ancestor impure, 
For this we may thank Adam. 
The great masters in composition know very well that many an 
elegant phrase becomes improper for a poet or an orator when it 

has been debased by common use The judgment of a poet 

very much discovers itself in shunning the common roads of expres- 
sion, without falling into such ways of speech as may seem stiff 
and unnatural; he must not swell into the false sublime by en- 
deavoring to avoid the other extreme. 

Addison then proceeds to enumerate the ways by which, 
according to Aristotle, the language of verse may be dis- 
tinguished from that of prose, and illustrates them by 
reference to Paradise Lost. They are: 

1. The use of metaphor. (But the poet is not to have 
recourse to this when the proper and natural words will do 
as well.) 

2. The use of idioms of other tongues. 'Under this 
head may be reckoned the placing the adjective after the 
substantive, the transposition of words, the turning the 
adjective into a substantive, with several foreign modes of 
speech which this poet has naturalized to give his verse 
the greater sound, and throw it out of prose.' 

3. Use of several old words or words newly coined 
(miscreated, hell-doomed, etc.). 

However, Addison believes that Milton has taken these 
liberties rather too frequently, and has thereby stiffened 
and obscured his style. But he admits that this license is 
perhaps more necessary in blank verse than in rime. 'Rime, 



6o Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

without any other assistance, throws the language off from 
prose/ 

2. Gray^: The language of the age is never the language of 
poetry; except among the French, whose verse, where the thought 
and image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose. Our 
poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself, to which 
almost every one that has written has added something by enriching 
it with foreign idioms and derivations : nay, sometimes words of 
their own composition or invention. Shakespeare and Milton have 
been great creators this way ; and no one more licentious than 
Pope or Dryden, who perpetually borrow expressions from the 
former. Let me give you some instances from Dryden, whom 
every one reckons a great master of our poetical tongue: — full of 
museful mopings, unlike the trim of love, a pleasant beverage, a 
roundelay of love, stood silent in his mood, with knots and knares 

deformed But they are infinite ; and our language not being 

a settled thing (like the French) has an undoubted right to words 
of a hundred years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them 
unintelligible. In truth, Shakespeare's language is one of his prin- 
ciple beauties Every word in him is a picture. 

3. Johnson^ : Language is the dress of thought ; and as the 
noblest action or the most graceful action would be degraded and 
obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of 
rustics or mechanics, so the most heroic sentiments would lose their 
efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if 
they are conveyed by words used only upon low and trivial occa- 
sions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant 
applications. Truth is indeed always truth, and reason is always 
reason ; they have an intrinsic and unalterable value, and constitute 
that intellectual gold which defies destruction : but gold may be so 
concealed in baser matter that only a chemist can recover it; sense 
may be so hidden in unrefined and plebeian words that none but 
philosophers can distinguish it. 

There was therefore before the time of Dryden no poetical dic- 
tion: no system of words at once refined from the grossness of 
domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to 
particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote defeat the pur- 
pose of the poet. From those sounds which we hear on small or 
on coarse occasions we do not easily receive strong impressions or 
delightful images; and words to which we are nearly strangers, 

^Letter to Richard West, April 4, 1742 (Letters i. 98). 

'Life of Cowley (Lives i. 58) ; Life of Dryden (Lives i. 420), 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES' 6 1 

whenever they occur, draw that attention to themselves which they 
should transmit to things. Those happy combinations of words 
which distinguish poetry from prose had been rarely attempted ; we 
had few elegances or flowers of speech. 

4. Goldsmith^ : It is indeed amazing, after what has been done 
by Dryden, Addison, and Pope, to improve and harmonize our native 
tongue, that their successors should have taken so much pains to 
involve it into pristine barbarity. These misguided innovators have 
not been content with restoring antiquated words and phrases, but 
have indulged themselves in the most licentious transpositions, and 
the harshest constructions, vainly imagining that the more their 
writings are unlike prose, the more they resemble poetry ; they have 
adopted a language of their own, and call upon mankind for admira- 
tion. All those who do not understand them are silent, and those 
who make out their meaning are willing to praise to show they 
understand. From these follies and affectations the poems of 
Parnell are entirely free ; he has considered the language of poetry 
as the language of life, and conveys the warmest thoughts in the 
simplest expression. 

The various opinions here so strongly expressed were 
weakly echoed in the average criticisms of the last 
decades of the century — in Blair's Essays on Rhetoric, for 
example, and in the Critical Review. It became a truism 
that 'our language has a special diction for poetry' ; but 
this special diction was usually definitely limited by the taste 
of the critic, and of the particular poets whom he chose 
to regard as models. The followers of Spenser and the 
followers of Pope each regarded the poetic diction of the 
other as entirely without justification, and were inclined to 
appeal to the standard of spoken language to reenforce 
their arguments. But meanwhile Burns and Cowper had v 
been silently preparing the way for another ideal — the one 
by employing the language of the lower and middle classes 
in his own land, and the other by illustrating his own ideal 
of expression — 'to make verse speak the language of prose 
without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such 
an order as they might naturally take in falling from the 

^ Life of Thomas ParncU {Works 4. 173). 



62 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, 
harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a 
syllable for the sake of rhyme.' 

4. Poetic Diction in i/()6-i'/Q'/'. 

But, as Coleridge says, in order to understand the reform 
of Wordsworth, we must also make ourselves acquainted 
with the sort of verse that was appearing when he began 
to write. It happens that some of the most typical examples 
of such verse are to be found in the Monthly Magazine, 
which was also publishing the revolutionary efforts of Cole- 
ridge and his friends. Apart from the productions of 
these young innovators, and apart also from a few deliber- 
ate imitations of Cowper and Collins and Gray, this verse 
divides itself into two types, or two variations upon one 
type. The difference consists in the versification rather 
than the language. 

On the one hand, we find examples of the heroic couplet 
and all the periphrastic elegances associated therewith. Of 
this type the following translation from Lucretious is a 
good example: 

For thee the fields their flowery carpet spread, 
And smiling Ocean smooths his wavy bed; 
A purer glow the kindling poles display, 
Robed in bright effluence of ethereal day, 
When through her portals bursts the gaudy Spring, 
And genial Zephyr waves his balmy wing. 
First the gay songsters of the feather'd train 
Feel thy keen arrows thrill in every vein.^ 

On the other hand, we find a large number of effusions 
in verse which, without materially differing from this speci- 
men in language, reveal the influence of Collins, Gray, and 
the Wartons in a sweeter and freer versification borrowed 
chiefly from Milton's minor poems. These poems (if 
poems they may be called) are characterized by a slightly 
simplified, though hardly more specific, diction, and by a 

^February, 1797. 



POETIC DICTION IN ^MODERN TIMES' 63 

rather unconvincing tone of melancholy and love of natural 
scenery. However, this love does not lead the authors to 
a very careful or intimate observation of the objects of 
their affection. For the most part, they, too, are content 
v\^ith the old inanities about balmy spring and all her monot- 
onous zephyrs. The following are specimens of this ameli- 
orated verse. The first is a rather favorable example of 
the results of the new^ interest in Milton's minor poems : 

Oh, far removed from my retreat 
Be Av'rice and Ambition's feet! 
Give me, unconscious of their power, 
To taste the peaceful, social hour. 
Give me, beneath the branching vine, 
The woodbine sweet, or eglantine, 
When evening sheds its balmy dews, 
To court the chaste, inspiring Muse.^ 

Here there is a complete absence of the periphrastic diction 
of the first example, though the imagery is still a little 
conventional. But such echoes of Dyer and other imitators 
of // Penseroso are less frequent than verses like the fol- 
lowing, in which the old words are fitted to new tunes : 

See, fairest of the nymphs that play 
In vernal meadows, blooming May 

Comes tripping o'er the plain. 
Lo ! All the gay, the genial powers 
That deck the woods or tend the flowers 

Compose her smiling train.^ 

To a Primrose. 
Pale visitant of balmy spring, 

Joy of the new-born year, 
Thou bidst young hope new plume his wing 

Soon as thy buds appear. 
While o'er the incense-breathing sky 
The tepid hours just dare to fly. 
And vainly woo the chilling breeze,^ etc. 

^February, 1797. 
''April, 1797. 



64 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

Now and then we find examples of natural imagery that 
is not only hopelessly general but absolutely false — the false- 
ness consisting in the unnatural personification displayed 
most conspicuously in those eighteenth-century verses in 
honor of 'nymphs' before whom lofty trees bow in rever- 
ence, and roses blush to find their beauties rivaled by the 
'lovely fair.' The bad habits inculcated by this extravagant 
gallantry lead poetasters into the most ridiculous falsifica- 
tions — even when they are celebrating a Nature that does 
not suffer from competition with these distracting goddesses. 
In the following effusion the coming of the sun (Apollo) is 
described in the terms formerly used of the advent of some 
lovely lady or dazzling lord : 

See ! As he comes, with general voice, 
All nature's living tribes rejoice, 

And own him as their king ; 
Ev'n rugged rocks their heads advance, 
And forests on the mountains dance. 

And hills and valleys sing} 

Such verse in a magazine of good character gives point to 
Wordsworth's rather sarcastic reference to the school of 
good sense : 'I have at all times endeavored to look steadily 
at my subject; consequently there is, I hope, in these poems 
little falsehood of description, and my ideas are expressed 
in language fitted to their respective importance. Some- 
thing must have been gained by this practice, as it is friendly 
to one property of good poetry, namely, good sense.' 

This latter type has been quoted at some length to show 
that M. Legouis is hardly correct in saying^ that the influ- 
ence of the landscape school was responsible for the poetic 
diction against which AVordsworth's efforts were directed. 
This poetic diction he describes as consisting in those devia- 
tions from the order and syntax of prose which he finds in 
Wordsworth's own early work. But, obviously, the one 

^June, 1797. 

^ The Early Life of William Wordsworth, pp. 127-134. 



POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES' 65 

thing that is not characteristic of contemporary verse is this 
departure from the ordinary usage of spoken language, 
either with respect to grammar or choice of words, if we 
regard the words separately, and not in combination. Of 
course there are a few examples of harsh constructions, 
such as the imitation of the ablative absolute, rather com- 
mon in the poetry of the later eighteenth century, and never 
wholly discarded by Wordsworth. But, for the most part, 
the grammar and syntax are correct and easy — as may be 
seen by looking back at the examples already quoted. In 
the first example there is a slight departure in the first, 
third, and fifth lines from the strict order of prose ; but we 
do not feel the inversion to be so awkward as it is in the 
lines from Wordsworth cited by M. Legouis. Moreover, 
the grammatical construction is quite simple and regular. 
In the second extract only the clause, 'Give me to 
taste,' seems rather unusual in the spoken language. In the 
next two poems, however, the order is strictly that of 
prose, and, apaft from the word 'incense-breathing,' there 
is not a word which might not be heard in fairly cultivated 
conversation. This, with one or two exceptions, is true 
of the other verses. On the whole, one could hardly 
expect in any age to find verse of the average character 
which w^as less unmusical, or more simple and clear in 
construction, or which employed fewer words not heard in 
ordinary speech. That these characteristics are typical 
may be seen by any reader who takes the trouble to examine 
the miscellanies and magazines of the day. The boast 
of the eighteenth century that it had at last made English 
verse metrically and grammatically correct is borne out by 
such an examination. 

What then is it that removes the language of this verse 
so far from nature and truth — for obviously this is not 
the way in which sensible men express themselves? While 
sensible men use these words separately, they do not use 
these combinations of them. They may employ the words 
genial, waves, balmy, and wing, at different times and for 



66 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

different purposes, but, in order to indicate that a soft and 
gentle breeze is blowing, they do not say that 'genial Zephyr 
waves his balmy wings/ In other words, the poetic diction 
consists, not in the separate words, but in those 'happy 
combinations' which, as Dr. Johnson says, distinguish 
poetry from prose. The peculiarity of these elegances of 
speech is that they suggest an image, not by using the word 
or words associated with it in everyday experience, but by 
using, in its stead, another image associated with it only in 
verse — a kind of accepted symbol for the image. Hence, 
instead of the clear and coherent pictures suggested simply 
by a list of the common names of the phenomena that actu- 
ally occur together in nature — green grass, sunshine, and 
violets, for instance, — we are given a heterogeneous mass 
of substitute images, which cannot be actually visualized 
without somewhat ridiculous results. To such an end had 
one attempt to make the language of verse approximate to 
the language of typical conversation arrived ! Yet it must 
not be forgotten that there had been such an attempt, even 
at the basis of this monstrous development. 

From this long review it may be seen that, on the whole, 
the authors of the Lyrical Ballads were justified in believ- 
ing that their theory and practice were in accordance w^th 
the best traditions of English poetry. It may also be seen 
that the question of poetic diction was exceedingly com- 
plicated, because it involved not only matters of vocabulary 
and grammar, but the far more difficult problems of rhet- 
oric, and the ultimate basis of rhetoric in human psychology. 
The special contribution of Wordsworth and Coleridge con- 
sisted in their recognition of these problems of psychology, 
and the insight and personal experience which they brought 
to bear upon them. The bold young poets of the Lyrical 
Ballads were merely restating an old proposition ; but the 
terms of the restatement were so striking, and the illustra- 
tions so original, that the old ideal seemed like a discovery 
of their own. But how they themselves happened to make 
the rediscovery we have yet to learn. 



CHAPTER 3. 

WORDSWORTH^S POETIC DEVELOPMENT PREVIOUS TO THE 
MEETING WITH COLERIDGE. 

To trace the different paths by which the vigorous and 
independent mountain-lad, and the dreamy but sociable 
young philosopher of Christ's Hospital, arrived at the same 
ideal of simplicity is not one of the least interesting of 
literary inquiries. It is the more interesting because 
simplicity was as little characteristic of the natural genius 
of the one as of the other. The only poet of the age who 
was normally as self-conscious and elaborate as S. T. 
Coleridge was William Wordsworth. And yet, as Words- 
worth said. 

Though mutually unknown, yea, nursed and reared 

As if in several elements, we were framed 

To bend at last to the same discipline. 

Predestined, if two beings ever were. 

To seek the same delights, and have one health, 

One happiness.' 

The final character of this discipline was determined as 
much by the youthful development of Coleridge as by that 
of Wordsworth; but since Wordsworth is, as it were, the 
hero of this tale, we must begin with his early experiments 
in poetry and criticism, and use those of Coleridge only 
as supplementary and illustrative material. 

Wordsworth's literary career was rather precocious. He 
was something of a critic before he was ten, and a really 
skilful maker of verses at the age of fourteen.- But even 
before this he had unconsciously begun to lay the founda- 

^ Prelude 6. 254-259. 

' The Idiot Boy 337-33^. 



68 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

tion of his future theory of poetry in those curious 
imaginative experiences described in the Prelude. No one 
who hves among the grand and lonely forms of nature 
is free from a touch of primitive superstition — from a 
tendency to start at the sudden rustling of leaves in a forest, 
or to feel a strangeness in the blovv^ing of the wind, or the 
motion of the sky above some unfrequented mountain- 
height. The facing of these inexplicable but unconquerable 
fears was the grand adventure of Wordsworth's boyhood. 
Sometimes he was ignominiously vanquished by them, as in 
that nocturnal experience when he seemed to feel the dark 
shape of the mountain at night stride after him 'with 
measured motion like a living thing,' and 'with trembling 
oars' rowed back to the safe covert of the willow.^ More 
often they entered suddenly into his consciousness in the 
midst of the excitement of some physical exploit : 

Oh! when I have hung 
Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass 
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock 
But ill sustained, and almost (so it seemed) 
Suspended by the blast that blew amain, 
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time 
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone. 
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
Blow through my ear ! the sky seemed not a sky 
Of earth — and with what motion moved the clouds !" 

To the haunting sense of strangeness in his contact with 
nature were added many other dim and undetermined 
feelings. Long afterwards, in his talks with Coleridge 
among the Quantock Hills, the memory of these threw a 
sudden light upon the old question of the character and 
source of poetic pleasure, showing him that the poet might 
be, as nature had been to him, the 'teacher of truth through 
joy and through gladness' — a creator of 'the faculties by 

^Prelude i. 357-400. 
"Prelude i. 330-339- 



Wordsworth's poetic development 69 

a process of smoothness and delight.'^ This early delight 
had been manifold in its character. Sometimes it was only 
an eager and inquisitive interest in the actual forms and 
appearances of things, a physical dehght almost as pure as 
it was violent. Sometimes it was a dim, half-pagan 
sympathy with life in all things — 

a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the Hght of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man," 

rising at times into a still contemplative consciousness of 
a world beyond the world of sense — of something which 
had power to make our 'noisy years seem moments in the 
being of the eternal Silence'^ — in the light of which all the 
solid material universe seemed to become a dream, a pros- 
pect in the mind. He was familiar, too, with the magical 
works of light and storm and mist and darkness among the 
hills. He says of the mountain shepherd: 

When up the lonely brooks on rainy days 

Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills 

By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes 

Have glanced upon him distant a few steps, 

In size a giant, stalking through thick fog, 

His sheep like Greenland bears ; or, as he stepped 

Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow, 

His form hath flashed upon me, glorified 

By the deep radiance of the setting sun: 

Or him have I descried in distant sky, 

A solitary object and sublime. 

Above all height! like an aerial cross 

Stationed alone upon a spiry rock 

Of the Chartreuse, for worship.* 

^ Letter to the Friend, Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, p. 68. 
'^ Lines composed a Few Miles Above Tintcrn Abbey, 95-99. 
^Intimations of Imwortality 159-160. 
* Prelude 8. 262-275. 



70 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

And such phenomena, produced by natural causes, had all 
the power of a supernatural experience over the heart of 
the imaginative boy, glorifying and transfiguring the com- 
monest things of every day with the light of visions and 
strange dreams. Later, the transfiguration was a conscious 
act of his own imagination, stimulated as it was by much 
reading among fairy tales and 'old romances.'^ A 'diamond 
light,' shed by the setting sun upon a wet rock in front of 
the cottage, would make the boy's fancy as restless as itself : 

'T was now for me a burnished silver shield 
Suspended over a knight's tomb, who lay 
Inglorious, buried in the dusky wood : 
An entrance now into some magic cave 
Or palace built by fairies of the rock/ 

These transports and pure delights of his boyhood, and 
the renovation of spirit due to his memory of them and 
return to them, must have been recalled in the memorable 
conversations which gave rise to the Lyrical Ballads. It 
then occurred to the two friends that the effect of poetry 
was quite analogous to the effect of these visionary appear- 
ances of nature — that it was the function of the poet to fix 
and retain for ever these momentary exaltations which 
were as fleeting as the phenomena which occasioned them. 
Thus poetry — such an enshrining of these experiences as 
The Daffodils, The Solitary Reaper, or Stepping West- 
\ward — might become what these memories were to Words- 
iworth, a fountain of refreshment to which he returned 
again and again : 

There are in our existence spots of time, 
That with a distinct pre-eminence retain 
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed 
By false opinion and contentious thought. 
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, 

^ Cf . Prelude 8. 406-420. 



Wordsworth's poetic development 71 

In trivial occupations, and the round 

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds 

Are nourished and invisibly repaired ; 

A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced, 

That penetrates, enables us to mount, 

When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. 

This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks 

Among those passages of life that give 

Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how. 

The mind is lord and master — outward sense 

The obedient servant of her will/ 

But this noble theory of imagination, which was the basis 
of the new style of the Lyrical Ballads, was also the fruit 
of conscious experiment during the fourteen years of lit- 
erary apprenticeship, and of a still longer period of critical 
reading. Every reader of Wordsworth's own account of 
himself as one of a band of active, noisy lads, whose year 
span through a giddy round of hunting, fishing, skating, 
and all the amusements of country schoolboys, must feel 
his early achievements of this sort to be rather remarkable. 
But his father 'Jiad cultivated his ear for verse, while he 
was a little child,'' by making him learn passages from 
Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton,^ and had furnished him 
with a 'golden store of books, '^ to which he always returned, 
in his vacations from school, with tempestuous delight. 
His love of reading even rivaled his love of fishing — rob- 
bing him of some brief holiday sport, and leading him to 
waste the precious hours, every minute of which he prob- 
ably had planned with all the foresight and economy of a 
boy home for a vacation: 

How often in the course 

Of those glad respites, though a soft west wind 

Ruffled the water to the angler's wish. 

For a whole day together, have I lain 

^Prelude 12. 208-223. 
"^Memoirs i. 34. 
^Prelude 5. 479. 



72 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

Down by thy side, O Derwent ! murmuring stream, 

On the hot stones, and in the glaring sun, 

And there have read, devouring as I read, 

Defrauding the day's glory, desperate ! 

Till with a sudden bound of smart reproach, 

Such as an idler deals with in his shame, 

I to the sport betook myself again/ 

When he was scarcely ten years old, this joy in reading 
began to develop into a conscious delight in metrical lan- 
guage, and he had learned to select from the passages his 
father taught him, and the possibly more gaudy verse he 
chose for himself, the lines and phrases that pleased him 
for their loveliness or pomp. He draws a charming picture 
of himself and a 'dear friend' circling the lake in a dewy 
early morning before any one was abroad, and repeating 
their favorite verses aloud with one voice, as happy, he 
says, as the birds whose songs accompanied them. This 
performance would often last 'for the better part of two 
dehghtful hours.' One is tempted to inquire whether the 
ten-year-old Wordsworth had already memorized enough 
verse to last through a two-hour recitation, or whether he 
said his favorites over and over.^ 

However this may be, his favorites were not such as his 
maturer taste approved : 

And, though full oft the objects of our love 

Were false, and in their splendour overwrought. 

Yet was there surely then no vulgar power 

Working within us, — nothing less, in truth, 

Than that most noble attribute of man, 

Though yet untutored and inordinate. 

That wish for something loftier, more adorned, 

Than in the common aspect, daily garb. 

Of human life. What wonder, then, if sounds 

Of exaltation echoed through the groves ! 

For, images, and sentiments, and words, 

^Prelude 5. 480-490. 
'Ihid. 5. 552 ff. 



WORDSWORTH S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 73 

And everything encountered or pursued 
In that delicious world of poesy, 
Kept holiday, a never-ending show, 
With music, incense, festival, and flowers!^ 

There could be no nobler tribute than this to the false ideals 
of poetic ornament which he was later to combat! But 
all the poetic ideals of the eighteenth century seem to have 
influenced Wordsworth in succession. One reason why his 
development is so interesting is that, unlike Coleridge and 
Lamb, he found his poetic inspiration, and the seeds of a 
progressive growth toward the ideal he was eventually to 
adopt, chiefly in the literature that was popular in the age 
preceding him. Beginning as a disciple of Pope, he pro- 
ceeds, through an interest in the landscape-poets, to all the 
sins of the revolutionary young writers of his own day. He 
therefore seems to represent in himself a whole period of 
literary development. 

I. A Disciple of Pope. 

Perhaps some of the 'several thousand' lines from Pope 
which Wordsworth could repeat long after his attack on 
Pope's language had begun to prove successful,- helped to 
swell his youthful recitations ; for in his first attempt at verse 
at the age of fourteen he shows himself to be a very clever 
pupil of the school of the heroic couplet. 'I was called 
upon, among other scholars,' he said, 'to write verses upon 
the completion of the second centenary from the founda- 
tion of the school [at Hawkshead] in 1585, by Archbishop 
Sandys. The verses were much admired, far more than 
they deserved, for they were but a tame imitation of Pope's 
versification, and a little in his style. This exercise, how- 
ever, put it into my head to compose verses from the 
impulse of my own mind, and I wrote, while yet a school- 

^ Prelude 5. 569-583- 
"'L. W. F. 3. 122. 



74 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

boy, a long poem running upon my own adventures, and 
the scenery of the country in which I was brought up. 
The only part of that poem which has been preserved is the 
conclusion of it, which stands at the beginning of my col- 
lected Poems. '^ Although, as far as poetic substance and 
originality are concerned, the Lines written as a School 
Exercise at Hawkshead^ deserve Wordsworth's disparaging 
remarks, the apparent ease with which he manipulates the 
metre, without transgressing the numerous rules laid down 
by the critics of the eighteenth century, is remarkable. 
Few passages of verse produced in the palmy days of the 
couplet show so very little variation from the ideal stand- 
ard, already described in these pages, as this effort of the 
country schoolboy. There is no unnecessary expletive in 
the whole production, and hardly a single example of 
hiatus^; no wrenching of the accent, no unusual form of 
a word. The rhymes are all exact, with the exception of 
'driven' and 'heaven,' and 'grove' and 'move,'* which are 
usual in the heroic couplet. There are only two alexan- 
drines,^ and no triplets. Moreover, the construction of the 
sentences is clear, and shows less departure from the normal 
order of prose than is common in this type of verse; for, 
despite Dryden's strictures, there was always a tendency 
to invert the order in a line, in such a way that the rhyme 
fell on the verb — a mannerism which was considered by 
some an elegant improvement. There is a natural break 

^Memoirs i. 10-13. 

" Reprinted in the Oxford edition, pp. 618-619. 

^ 86 : 'And learn from thence thy own defects to scan' is an 
exception. Wordsworth was always careful to avoid hiatus — more 
careful than most poets of the nineteenth century, to whose ears it 
was less offensive than the poets of the preceding century felt it 
to be 

' 1-2, 13-14. 

® 40, 62. In both cases the alexandrine is used with some climactic 
effect at the end of a period. 



Wordsworth's poetic development 75 

at the end of every couplet. This easy, though somewhat 
oratorical, style may be illustrated by the following extract^ : 

No jarring monks, to gloomy cell confined, 
With mazy rules perplex the weary mind ; 
No shadowy forms entice the soul aside, 
Secure she walks, Philosophy her guide. 
Britain, who long her warriors had adored, 
And deemed all merit centred in the sword; 
Britain, who thought to stain the field was fame, 
Now honour'd Edward's less than Bacon's name. 
Her sons no more in listed fields advance 
To ride the ring, or toss the beamy lance; 
No longer steel their indurated hearts 
- To the mild influence of the finer arts ; 
Quick to the secret grotto they retire 
To court majestic truth, or wake the golden lyre. 

2. A Disciple of the Landscape-School 

About this time Wordsworth's newly awakened poetic 
ambition received an impulse which resulted in something 
better than this facile reproduction of the conventionalities 
of the heroic couplet, and the empty and gaudy imagery 
associated with it. On the way between Hawkshead and 
Ambleside, he happened to notice the darkening boughs and 
leaves of an oak-tree, outlined clearly and strongly against 
the sunset sky. like so many of the things that he hap- 
pened to see for himself, the discovery of this change in the 
famiUar appearance of things, wrought by the evening 
light, came to him with the freshness and power of a great 
revelation. The moment was important in my poetical 
history ; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite 
variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed 
by poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted 
with them; and I made a resolution to supply, in some 
degree, the deficiency. I could not have been at that time 

'49-62. 



76 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

above fourteen years of age.'^ The direction thus given to 
his imaginative energies seems to have determined his 
choice of reading, and the nature of his experiments in 
verse, until the end of his schooldays. Then the 'still, sad 
music of humanity' entered his poetry as an even deeper 
and more powerful impulse than this first vision of the 
marvels of the external world. 

The first result of this discovery of his own powers seems 
to have been a style of much grace and simplicity, which 
gradually developed into a morbid peculiarity of expres- 
sion, and was regained only by a deliberate effort. The 
only examples of this earlier purity of diction that we 
have are the extract, 'Dear Native Regions,' mentioned 
by Wordsworth in the remark just quoted apropos of the 
School Exercise; the sonnet Written in very Early Youth; 
and the Lines written while sailing in a Boat, which with 
the Remembrance of Collins originally formed one piece. 
None of these survives in its original form. For this reason 
M. Legouis,- comparing them with the 'genuine samples' 
of Wordsworth's early work, supposes their simplicity to 
be entirely the result of later correction. They are 'early 
poems only in respect of their subject-matter,' he says. 
This might seem probable — on the supposition that Words- 
worth had but one early style — if it were not for two 
important circumstances. 

In the first place, Wordsworth prints the first two as 
Juvenile Poems, along with the Evening Walk and the 
Descriptive Sketches; and, with his usual scrupulous 
honesty, prefixes to the group the following note^: 'Of 
the Poems in this class, the Evening Walk and Descriptive 
Sketches were first published in 1793. They are reprinted 
with some alterations that were chiefly made very soon after 
their publication. It would have been easy to amend them, 

^Memoirs i. 67-68. 

■ The Early Life of William Wordsworth, p. 121. 

^The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth [1820] i. 64. 



WORDSWORTPI S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 77 

in many passages, both as to sentiment and expression, 
and I have not been altogether able to resist the tempta- 
tion, as will be obvious to the attentive reader, in some 
instances; these are few, for I am aware tliat attempts 
of this kind are made at the risk of injuring those char- 
acteristic features which, after all, will be regarded as the 
principal recommendations of juvenile poems/ When he 
is tempted into further alterations he adds to this comment 
a further qualification^ : 'This notice, which was written 
some time ago, scarcely applies to the Poem ''Descriptive 
Sketches," as it now stands. The corrections, though 
numerous, are not, however, such as to prevent its retain- 
ing with propriety a place in the class of Juvenile Pieces/ 
But in neither of these notes does he mention the poems 
which M. Legouis considers early only in respect to sub- 
ject-matter. Hence he must have considered his corrections 
so slight and unimportant as not to detract in the least from 
their original character. It is inconceivable that a man who 
applies the term 'Juvenile Poems' with such scrupulous 
accurac}' should have silently included under that title pieces 
that were early In substance only, not in style. 

Moreover, it is not difficult to determine approximately 
the degree of alteration in the case of these poems. At 
least, a detailed study of the nine different versions can 
leave very little doubt in the mind of the one who makes 
the examination, though it is not very easy to condense the 
results into a convincing proof. 

In the first place, these nine versions may be classified 
as follows : 

I. A poem of fourteen lines in octosyllabic couplets, 
preserved in: 

(a) The group of juvenile pieces, printed in the edition 
of 1815, and reprinted with alterations in the editions of 
1820, 1827, 1832, 1836, 1841, and 1845. 

^The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth [1836] i. 46. 



78 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

(b) A manuscript version reprinted by Knight from a 
notebook containing parts of Laodamia, Artegal and Eli- 
dure, Black Comb, the Dedication of The White Doe, etc. 
(Wordsworth's Poetical Works 6. 365). 

2. The paraphrase in blank verse of the original poem 
in Prelude 8. 467-475. 

So many different versions, all purporting to represent the 
original production, do suggest that the only permanent 
element in the poem is the subject-matter. But a closer 
examination simplifies the matter. The variations are then 
discovered to affect less than half the poem, and to be lim- 
ited, for the most part, to a wavering choice between two 
possibilities. One source of the two possibilities then 
becomes obvious. An original poem in octosyllabic couplets 
was paraphrased in blank verse for the Prelude; and the 
alterations suggested by the attempt to avoid rhyme, and 
to expand tetrameters into pentameters, were then experi- 
mentally transferred to the original, and, in some cases, 
finally rejected. The result is that the latest version, which 
now stands at the beginning of Wordsworth's collected 
works in the Oxford edition, probably represents the 
earliest form as well as any except the first printed version 
(1815). The doubtful lines in it may be easily indicated, 
and the extent of the doubt determined, by a comparison of 
this with the paraphrase in the Prelude, and with the other 
versions. 

I. The Final Version (that of 1845). (The doubtful 
words or phrases are printed in italics.) 

Dear native regions, I foretell, 

From what I feel at this farewell, 

That, whereso'er my steps may tend. 

And whenso'er by course shall end. 

If in that hour a single tie 

Survive of local sympathy. 

My soul will cast the backward view, 

The longing look alone on you. ♦ 



WORDSWORTH S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 79 

Thus, while the Sun sinks down to rest 
Fa?' in the regions of the west, 
Though to the vale no parting beam 
Be given, not one memorial gleam, 
A lingering light he fondly throws 
On the dear hills where first he rose. 

2. The Prelude 8. 468-475. 

Dear native Regions, wheresoe'er shall close 
My mortal course, there will I think on you ; 
Dying, will cast on you a backward look ; 
Even as this setting sun (albeit the Vale 
Is nowhere touched by one memorial gleam) 
Doth with the fond remains of his last power 
Still linger, and a farewell lustre sheds 
On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose. 

A glance at these two versions shows that the greater 
part of the poem seems to be quite stable. It remains 
unaltered in all the various editions, and is reproduced in 
the Prelude as exactly as the metre will permit. This 
imchanging portion may be taken to represent the part of 
the original that clearly survives. If it did differ from the 
original, Wordsworth could have hardly concealed the fact 
through so many editions. A nervous uncertainty about 
the wisdom of his own alterations often led him to keep 
recurring to the earlier form of a poem in later versions; 
and, in the case of a juvenile poem, this tendency would 
be increased by a scrupulous fear of dishonestly departing 
from the youthful style. Hence, where he contentedly 
writes down the same words, with never a change or a 
qualm of conscience, for seven different editions, it may be 
assumed that no other form of these changeless lines is 
present in his consciousness. Where he does alter, he is 
likely to alter more than once, and the obvious fluctuation 
generally reveals the existence of another form in his own 
mind, and sometimes a character of that form also. 



8o Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Since so much of the final version seems to represent the 
original, we might be justified in taking it as characteristic 
of Wordsworth's youthful style without further ado. But 
if some of the lines in italics can be proved to be less doubt- 
ful tlian they seem, this corroboration of our judgment will 
be welcome. Perhaps the best way to decide this will be 
to examine the questionable phrases one by one. 

I. Line 3. The only reason for doubting this verse, and 
the two other words in this stanza printed in italics, is fur- 
nished by the manuscript version, in which lines 3 and 4 
read: 

That, when the close of life draws dear [sic],'^ 
And I must quit this earthly sphere, 

and in which tender tie occurs instead of single tie. In all 
the printed versions, the first eight lines are as they stand 
in the last edition. The relation of these two variants to 
each other, and to the original, cannot be determined. Since 
neither of the rhyme-words occurs in the blank verse, and 
since the word close does occur there as well as in the manu- 
script version, it is not unlikely that close originally stood 
for end, and that the couplet had a different rhyme. This is 
the more likely because there is nothing in the blank verse 
which seems to stand for the line, whereso'er my steps may 
tend. This might have been added to furnish a rhyme for 
end, if the rhyme of the couplet was altered from an earlier 
form upon which the passage in the Prelude was based. 
Concerning the variants, tender and single, no conclusion 
can be drawn. Tender looks like one of those experimental 
and not very happy changes that Wordsworth often made 
upon second thought, only to return at last to his original 
inspiration. Whatever may be the truth concerning the 
slight variations in the first eight lines, however, they do not 
seriously affect the character and style of the poem. 

^ Is this a misprint for which Professor Knight, not Wordsworth, 
is responsible? 



Wordsworth's poetic development 8i 

2. Lines 9-12 underwent more change than any other 
part of the Extract. In the edition of 181 5 they stood as 
follows : 

Thus when the Sun, prepared for rest, 
Hath gained the precincts of the West, 
Though his departing radiance fail 
To illuminate the hollow Vale. 

All the versions except the last present slight modifications 
of this phraseology; but the instability of the various 
grammatical relations in virtually the same group of words 
seems to indicate that there was something in the construc- 
tion of the original with which Wordsworth was not quite 
satisfied. This opinion is strengthened by the fact that line 
1 1 is incomplete in the manuscript version, where it is writ- 
ten, Though no . . . can fail. Perhaps the truth is that 
the original rhyme-words were fail and vale, and Words- 
worth, after struggling in vain to remove some blemish 
without altering the rhyme, finally imported the beautiful 
phrase memorial gleam from the blank verse, and changed 
the other line in the couplet to correspond with it. It is 
very likely that the word precincts stood for the word 
regions in line 10, since this occurs in all the other versions. 
Perhaps, on the whole, the lines in the edition of 181 5 
come as near the original as any. In any case, the same 
idea and the same group of words seem to be present in all 
the versions until, in the final edition, the puzzling twelfth 
line is materially changed. 

3. In lines 13-14, the variants represent the temporary 
influence of the blank verse. In the editions 1820-1840 the 
last line reads: On the dear mountain-tops zvhere first he 
rose, and in 1832-1840 lustre is substituted for light. In 
both cases the change in metre in the blank verse may have 
made necessary the change from a monosyllabic word, 
which was then transferred for a time to the original ver- 
sion. The last line in the passage from the Prelude is 
obviously the original tetrameter expanded to a pentameter 



82 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

by the easy substitution of mountain-tops for hills. When, 
therefore, we find that the octosyllabic poem sometimes ends 
with this decasyllabic line, we may consider it a temporary 
intruder; and believe that the first printed version, the 
manuscript version, and the last version, represent the 
original when they read : 

A lingering light he fondly throws 
On the dear hills where first he rose, 

as opposed to 

A lingering lustre fondly throws 

On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose, 

which so obviously echoes the blank verse. Hence the more 
simple and pathetic form, in this case, seems to be the 
original. 

The result of this examination seems to be: (i) that, 
of the words in italics, light and hills, and probably single, 
represent the original ; (2) that in two of the couplets there 
may have been a different rhyme, and a corresponding dif- 
ference in phraseology; and (3) that, while the rhymes in 
lines 9-10 seem to be permanent, there is a slight variation 
otherwise. If we are right in supposing that the part of 
the poem which shows no fluctuation probably survives 
substantially as it was first written, these changes really 
affect its essential character very little. Of course it may 
be said that the comparison of a poem of 1786, first printed 
in 181 5, with a paraphrase probably written between 1799 
and 1805, but not printed until 1850, does not give very 
trustworthy evidence concerning the original style. For 
aught we know, the passage in the Prelude may have been 
remodeled in accordance with the printed version of 181 5. 
But since, in all the public appearances of the production, 
there is no trace whatever of a form essentially different 
from the form printed by Wordsworth as a juvenile poem, 
there seems to be no reason for doubting the word of so 



Wordsworth's poetic development 83 

honest a man. The burden of proof certainly rests upon 
those who presume to question the statement of the poet.^ 

What has been said concerning the Extract apphes almost 
equally to the Sonnet Written in Early Youth. The absence 
of the fluctuation characteristic of the selections from the 
descriptive poems which Wordswortli did correct,- and the 
testimony of the poet himself, justify us in accepting it as 
a genuine sample of the writing of the Hawkshead days, 
at least until some proof to the contrary is adduced. Such 
proof M. Legouis finds in the fact that the style of these 
verses differs very much from that of the early poems of 
which we possess the original text. Any conclusions con- 
cerning Wordsworth's youthful tendencies drawn from the 
latter are flatly contradicted by the former. It is reasonable 
to deduce the characteristics of his early work from the 
only authentic examples of it, and then to question the 
authenticity of those which do not possess these charac- 
teristics. It seems the more reasonable in this case because 
the doubtful poems first appear in print long after they 
purport to have been written. Yet there is a plausible 
explanation of the difficulty. 

The 'genuine samples' upon which M. Legouis bases his 
very able and discriminating study of Wordsworth's youth- 
ful style are indeed marked by an awkwardness in the use 
of language, and a love of morbid conceits and curiously 
elaborate phraseology. These are in noticeable contrast to 
the easy manipulation of language and metre, and the 

^ Among other things it would be necessary to prove that Words- 
worth ever succeeds in changing the essential style of a poem by 
his numerous small alterations. Peter Bell has all the character- 
istics of a lyrical ballad, though it was not published until 1819; 
from the much corrected versions of The Thorn and Simon Lee, 
we can still deduce in the final edition most of the characteristics 
of the style of 1798. 

^ There are only two slight changes. In 1827 the line, 'Is up and 
cropping yet his later meal,' is altered to 'Is cropping audibly his 
later meal,' and 'comes to heal' is substituted for 'seems to heal.* 



84 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

simplicity of thought and feeHng in the Extract and the 
Sonnet. But these latter poems seem to be productions of 
Wordsworth's school-days at Hawkshead, while the earliest 
date for the other poems is 1787, the year Wordsworth 
entered the university. Of these poems, the Sonnet on 
seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep,^ published 
March, 1787, while curiously exaggerated in thought, shows 
less departure from grammar and good usage than An 
Evening Walk and the Descriptive Sketches; and, of these 
two, the later and more powerful poem is also the most 
faulty with respect to style. Hence, for a time, Words- 
worth's sins seem to increase with his increase in vigor and 
originality. 

But, as we learn from the Prelude,^ 

that first poetic faculty 
Of plain Imagination and severe 

was greatly impaired by the influx of new and alien expe- 
riences between the time that Wordsworth left, or was pre- 
paring to leave, his own native hills for the busy world, 
and the time when he returned to them, and found peace 
of mind, and the lost simplicity of life and style, among 
the associations of his boyhood. This unwholesome period 
of his life seems to correspond with the dates of the poems 
on which M. Legouis bases his study of Wordsworth's 
early style (1787-1794). It is distinguished from his 
vigorous and healthy childhood by the same marks that 
distinguish the verse written at this time from the pro- 
ductions which we have taken to represent the work of his 
school-days. 

^Of course it is not absolutely certain that Wordsworth wrote 
this poem. The reasons for attributing it to him are well stated by 
Professor Harper (William Wordsworth i. 148-149). Since the 
authorship is uncertain, I do not think it can furnish much evidence 
concerning Wordsworth's early style. 

^Prelude 12. 89-147. 



Wordsworth's poetic development 85 

On the one hand, there is the loss of the simpUcity and 
unity of imaginative feeling associated with his delight in 
external nature, and his unquestioning acceptance of the 
only type of experience that he knew\ The adaptation to 
a new environment and to a new world of ideas meant a 
temporary disorganizing of his whole intellectual life, and 
the growth of a self-conscious and analytic habit of mind, 
which also showed itself in a disorganization of an earlier 
and simpler style. 

On the other hand, there is a distinct increase in intel- 
lectual power. From his graceful school-boy work we 
should derive very little notion of the real magnitude and 
strength of Wordsworth's genius. He seems to be only 
another disciple of the // Penseroso landscape-school of Col- 
lins, Warton, and Bowles, with a distinct vein of his own, 
perhaps, and occasional felicity of melody or phrase, but not 
essentially different or more powerful. With the Descrip- 
tive Sketches it is otherwise. 'Seldom, if ever,' wrote 
Coleridge,^ 'was the emergence of an original poetic genius 
above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In 
the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the 
structure of the particular lines and periods, there is a harsh- 
ness and acerbity connected and combined with words and 
images all aglow, which might recall those products of the 
vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of the 
hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit 
w^as elaborating. The language was not only peculiar and 
strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own 
im.patient strength ; while the novelty and struggling crowds 
of images, acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the 
st}4e, demanded always a greater closeness of attention, than 
poetry, (at all events than descriptive poetry) has a right 
to claim.' 

This correspondence of the known dates of one group 
of early poems with a period of unrest and unequal develop- 

^B. L.^i. 56. 



86 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

ment of new energies, described in the Prelude, explains 
the immense difference between this verse and that which 
seems to have been produced before his disturbing sally 
into the world beyond his northern hills. 'The poetic 
Psyche/ says Coleridge/ 'in its process to full develop- 
ment, undergoes as many changes as its Greek name-sake, 
the butterfly/ It is not remarkable, therefore, that the 
young Wordsworth should have had more than one early 
style. His development in this respect is not unique. 'Per- 
haps a similar process has happened to others,' writes 
Coleridge,^ 'but my earliest poems were marked by an ease 
and simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with inferior 
success, to impress on my later compositions.' The words 
in which he describes his later efforts to prune the luxuriance 
and peculiarity of phrase which succeeded this earlier 
simplicity might be applied without change to Wordsworth's 
ineffectual attempts to aXterihe Descriptive Sketches^: 'In 
the after editions, I pruned the double epithets with no spar- 
ing hand, and used my best efforts to tame the swell and 
glitter both of thought and diction; though in truth, these 
parasite plants of youthful poetry had insinuated themselves 
into my longer poems with such intricacy of union, that I 
was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from the 
fear of snapping the flower.' The apologetic description of 
this unwholesome stage in a young poet's development pre- 
fixed by Keats to Endymion is well known : 'The imagina- 
tion of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a 
man is healthy ; but there is a space of life between, in which 
the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of 
life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds 
mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men 
I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following 
pages.' It is in this space of Hfe between boyhood and man- 



'B. L. 


I. 57. 


^Ibid. 


I. 4. 


'Ibid. 


I. 3. 



Wordsworth's poetic development 87 

hood that Wordsworth's early poems cease to be simple and 
clear. 

Accordingly, before we turn to the more particular con- 
sideration of this second early style, we seem to be justified 
in summing up the results of our study of Wordsworth's 
earhest poems as follows: When, at fourteen, Words- 
worth's discovery of his own power to produce the music 
of 'words in tuneful order' happened to coincide with the 
sudden recognition of the novelty of his own observations 
and adventures among his own hills, he was naturally led to 
write of these marvels. This caused him to turn away from 
the school of Pope, which could furnish him few models 
of such descriptive writing, to the landscape-school of the 
later part of the century, which derived so much of its 
inspiration from Milton's minor poems. Instead of the 
heroic couplet, he employs the octosyllabic verse of // Pen- 
serosa, which was the mark of the school, and had been 
skilfully used by Collins, Dyer, and Warton. This inev- 
itably led the clever and imitative boy to reproduce the 
easy and unfettered melody, the direct and simple expres- 
sion, the clear natural imagery, and the general tone of 
pathos, which were characteristic of the reaction against 
Pope. The literary reminiscences in this verse all reflect 
reading of this type. The Extract is in the metre of // 
Penseroso,^ and in one case seems to reflect the plaintive 
Bowles.^ The plaintiveness of Bowles, however, is so 
seldom original in its expression that almost anything 
apparently borrowed from him might have been borrowed 
from his masters. The sonnet is variously suggestive of 

^ This metre was also a favorite with Lady Winchelsea, who gave 
it some of the music of Marvel's tetrameters. 

-7-8. Cf. Bowles, Sonnet XV, lo-ii. Of course, since the first 
sonnets of Bowles did not appear until 1789, lines borrowed from 
Bowles must have been added later. I do not deny the possibility 
of such corrections and additions ; I merely believe that in this case, 
as in his later poems, Wordsworth did not succeed in altering the 
essential character and style of the verse. 



88 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Cowper/ Lady Winchelsea,^ and Bowles. A later recur- 
rence to the same style, in the Lines written on the Thames 
in 1789, is frankly imitative of Collins. This reveals the 
source of the simplicity. It is not the simplicity of Words- 
worth's later style, transferred thither by a judicious cor- 
recting hand. It is as clearly the result of imitation as the 
more oratorical and conventional ease of the School Exercise 
in the manner of Pope. 

But the poetic development of these years cannot be 
measured by the finished achievements alone. Much of the 
verse composed at Hawkshead never saw the light in its 
original form ; but it became the foundation of many of the 
poems of Wordsworth's later years. From this early time 
dates the substance of the Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew- 
Tree, and part of the expression. It is not usually recog- 
nized that these lines are a kind of preliminary sketch of 
the Solitary in the Excursion; and that one of Words- 
worth's most mature and subtle studies of character has 
thus a certain basis in the writing and observation of his 
school-days. The Prelude may have a similar foundation in 
his first autobiographical effort — a 'long poem running on 
my own adventures, and the scenery of the country in which 
I was brought up,' and containing 'thoughts and images, 
most of which have been dispersed through my other 
writings.' Since Wordsworth paraphrases the conclusion 
of this poem for the Prelude, he may also have used descrip- 
tions of his 'adventures' in his curiously vivid reproduction 
of the fears and spiritual dramas of childhood. His 
account of the black crag that seemed to stride after him,^ 

^ With the line, 'Calm is all Nature as a resting wheel,' cf. Cow- 
per, The Task i. 367 ff., and Fragment 14-17 by Lady Anne Win- 
chelsea {Poems and Extracts, chosen by Wordsworth, pp. 13-14), 
See a similar figure in the sonnets beginning, // these brief Rec- 
ords 9-1 1. {The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Oxford edition, 
p. 270.) 

^ Wordsworthiana, p. 330. 

^Prelude 2. 357-400. 



Wordsworth's poetic development 89 

and of his impatient waiting on the windy height for the 
'palfreys that should bear us honie/^ suggest an experience 
consciously heightened by a youthful poet, and a supersti- 
tious compunction which originally may have had a more 
conventionally religious coloring.- Several youthful poems 
also seem to be reproduced in the eighth book of the 
Prelude,^ in the lines ending with the paraphrase of Dear 
native Regions. If only he had preserved the original, 
describing the wet rock sparkling in the evening radiance 
like the burnished shield of some dead knight, or the ghtter- 
ing entrance to a fairy cave! It might have been an 
interesting contrast to some of the Lyrical Ballads. 

Although the romantic substance of most of the verses 
did not please Wordsworth's mature taste, he himself 
declares that all of them had a basis in truthful observa- 
tion — that his most airy fancies revolved around a sub- 
stantial center. This is certainly true of the only specimens 
of his work at Hawkshead that he preserved. Imitations 
as they are, they are at the same time genuine expressions 
of unified knowledge and feeling; and hence they have a 
charm and an artistic completeness that are lacking in his 
more powerful Descriptive Sketches. The Sonnet, espe- 
cially, does not suffer by its position in the edition of 1807, 
side by side with some of Wordsworth's finest efforts in 
this type of verse.* It is so clear-cut, so unique in its own 
felicity of observation and phrase, that it seems to preclude 
comparison with its more powerful neighbors. This charm 

^ Ibid. 12. 287-316. 
" Note especially 314-316. 
^ Prelude 8. 365-475. 

" Wordsworth himself says that, in his schooldays at Hawkshead, 
Fancy 

could feed at Nature's call 
Some pensive musings which might well beseem 
Maturer years. 

Prelude 8. 456-458. 



90 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

of Wordsworth's juvenile efforts was recognized by the 
critic of the volumes of 1815/ who, in the tone of pious 
exhortation made fashionable by Jeffrey, remarks that they 
show what Wordsworth might have done, had he not been 
led astray by his lamentable theories. But Wordsworth 
had gone astray long before he gave any public expression 
to his theories. He was not born to stop with the develop- 
ment of sixteen, even if this did make him a pensive land- 
scape-poet of the first order. The energy so characteristic 
of his childhood had to shape for itself new and greater 
forms, even at the expense of harshness, and crudity, and 
failure. 

J. The Cambridge Period. 

Between 1787 and 1793 Wordsworth's boyish interest in 
the poetic expression of what was novel and wonderful in 
his own experience took a more ambitious form. 

Those were the days 
Which also first emboldened me to trust 
With firmness, hitherto but slightly touched 
By such a daring thought, that I might leave 
Some monument behind me which pure hearts 
Should reverence. The instinctive humbleness, 
Maintained even by the very name and thought 
Of printed books and authorship, began 
To melt away ; and further, the dread awe 
Of mighty names was softened down and seemed 
Approachable, admitting fellowship 
Of modest sympathy. Such aspect now, 
Though not familiarly, my mind put on, 
Content to observe, to achieve, and to enjoy.^ 

But with growing power came a temporary difficulty in the 
manipulation of language, which was in notable contrast 
with his earlier facility, and a wilfulness of fancy and con- 

^ Monthly Review 78. 2^^. 
^Prelude 6. 52-65. 



WORDSWORTH S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 9 1 

ceit, which was the result of a new self-consciousness, and 
of rapidly developing intellectual energies. 

The difficulty with language Wordsworth himself ascribes 
partly to an inexperienced attempt to conform to 'book- 
notions and to rules of art,' and partly to the practice of 
composing Latin verse at school.^ 

The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase 
From languages that want the living voice 
To carry meaning to the natural heart. 

The first led him to incorporate into his own verse any 
word or phrase that had pleased him in his desultory read- 
ing, usually with some modification or exaggeration that 
was not always for the best. The second resulted in some 
eccentricities of grammar and syntax more suitable to a 
highly inflected language, with a variable order and a com- 
plex structure, than to an uninflected language like Eng- 
lish, which is so largely dependent upon the order of words. 
However, tlie book-notions and rules of art did not pre- 
vent Wordsworth from being catholic and enterprising in 
his choice of a vocabulary. He does not elevate his style, 
or confine himself to a certain type of words, or even 
indulge in refined periphrasis, in accordance with the tradi- 
tions of the eighteenth century. He takes a good word 
wherever he finds it. Accordingly terms from the northern 
dialects — such as gill/ intake,^ sugh,'^ etc. — stand side by 
side with unusual Latin forms borrowed from Milton. He 
is especially interested in words denoting color and sound. 
He speaks of the 'sullen dark-brown mere,'^ of the 'tawny 
earth,'^ 'pale-blue rocks,'^ etc., seeking to differentiate color 

Ubid. 6. 110-112. Cf. B. L. i. 13. 

'E. W. 72. 

'E. W. 65. 

*E. W. 317; D. S. 437. 

'E. W. 371. 

'E. W. 170. 

'E. W. 149. 



92 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

from color, and shade from shade, as well as the English 
language will permit. Similarly, he takes onomatopoeic 
words expressing sound from every source — colloquial or 
literary. He speaks of the chisel's clinking sound. '^ 
'Each clanking mill, that broke the murmuring streams, '- 
'The distant forge's swinging thump profound'^ ; and makes 
liberal use of the suggestions that he finds in the poetry of 
Gray or Milton — such as the phrase 'drowsy tinklings,'* 
the word 'complain'^ as applied to the note of the owl, the 
'droning flight' of the beetle,^ and the curfew 'swinging 
low with sullen roar.'^ The same desire to add to his 
vocabulary leads him to adopt any unusual epithet which he 
discovers in reading. Like Warton, he speaks of the 
'embattled clouds.'^ Like Cowper, and unlike his own later 
self, he finds the note of the owl 'boding.'^ Where Milton 
had spoken of 'rocking winds,' he speaks of 'rocking 
shades'^^; in imitation of the line, 'minute drops from off 
the eaves,' he creates the compound, 'minute-steps'^^ ; the 
expression 'huddling brook' becomes 'huddling rill'^^ ; 'dim 
reUgious light' is copied in the phrase 'dim religious 
groves,'^^ etc. 

'E. W. 145. 

' D. S. 766. 

'E. W.4AS- 

*Gray, Elegy 8. D. S. 435, 508; E. W. 354; cf. Waggoner i. 26. 
'That far-oif tinkling's drowsy cheer.' 

'E. IV. 443. Cf. Elegy 10. 

^ E. W. 314. A reminiscence of Elegy 7 and Lycidas 28 combined. 
Cf. a similar union of suggestions from Milton and Gray in the 
line {E. IV. 315), 'The whistling swain that plods his ringing way,' 

^ // Penseroso 76. Cf. E. W. 318 : 'The solemn curfew swinging 
long and deep.' 

® E. W. 55. Cf . Warton, Pleasures of Melancholy 294. 

'£. W. 392. Cf. The Task i. 205. 

'" E. W. 238. Cf . // Penseroso 126. 

" // Penseroso 130. 

"£. W. 71. Cf. Comus 496. 

'' D. S. 604. Cf . // Penseroso 160. 



Wordsworth's poetic development 93 

This practice is well described by M. Legouis^ : 'Lady 
Winchelsea said that children's tears are merely "April 
drops," but Wordsworth, speaking of his own childhood, 
writes, 

When Transport kissed away my April tear. 

Thompson invoked inspiration from her "hermit seat," 
(Summer 15), but Wordsworth, to whom the epithet appears 
an ingenious one, boldly applies it to the wave of a solitary 
lake ("hermit waves"), or to the door of a humble Swiss 
cottage hidden among the mountains ("hermit doors"). 
. . . Whereas Gray spoke of the "cock's shrill clarion," 
Wordsworth speaks of his "clarion throat." Gray repre- 
sented the Nile as brooding "o'er Egypt with his watery 
wing" ; Wordsworth pictures the wave of Liberty as brood- 
ing "the nations o'er with Nile-like wings." . . . Pope 
calls the second son of William the Conqueror his "second 
hope" ; W^ordsworth describes the eldest son of a poor vag- 
rant as her "elder grief." With Pope the repose of death is 
the "Sabbath of the tomb" ; for Wordsworth the canton of 
Unterwalden, with its silent summits, is a "Sabbath region." 
But the occasions on which Wordsworth has borrowed are 
so numerous that a special edition would be required to 
exhaust the list. Suffice it to say that, besides the poets 
already mentioned, many others of the eighteenth century 
are laid under contribution by him, whether the fact is 
acknowledged in his notes, and by quotation marks, or not, 
such as Young, Home, Smollett, Beattie. To these might be 
added two French names, Delille and Rosset, the author of 
U Agriculture ou les Georgiques Frangaises, the most av/k- 
wardly periphrastic of our descriptive poets. Of course 
Wordsworth's imitations are not strictly limited to eigh- 
teenth century bards; some incrustations from Spenser, 
Shakespeare, and especially Milton, are to be discovered in 
his mosaic-work; he even makes use of passages from the 

' The Early Life of IVilliaju Wordsworth, p. 140 ff. 



94 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

Bible, which look very strange in the form of his elaborate 
couplet. To contemporary poets he seems to owe very little ; 
only a Scotch word to Burns, whom he names, a touch to 
Langhorne, more perhaps to Cowper's Task, and most to 
Samuel Rogers' Pleasures of Memory, of which he makes 
no mention.' 

Not only does he make use of all words and phrases that 
he can acquire in reading; he also attempts to widen the 
application of familiar words by a daring metaphorical 
use : — 'He tastes the meanest note that swells the gale.'^ 

the crashing wood 
Gives way, and half its pines torment the flood.^ 

His compounds are equally bold : *lip-dewing Song,'^ 'ring- 
let-tossing Dance,'* *oar- forgotten floods,'^ day-deserted 
home,'^ etc. 

Many of these expressions are exaggerated enough, as 
Wordsworth soon discovered; but the imaginative enter- 
prise that they display is remarkable. This is not the 
remnant of an old style ; it is the crude but vigorous begin- 
ning of the new. To say that these poems are in the 'poetic 
diction' of the eighteenth century is to speak, apparently, 
without having undergone the sad experience of reading the 
miscellanies of that period. Wordsworth does not juggle 
the old familiar expressions — 'balmy zephyrs,' 'blushing 
Flora,' 'paint the dewy meads,' etc. — into a slightly differ- 
ent position, and imagine he has made a new poem. He 
finds a new expression for a new image — even at the cost 
of being ridiculous; and in this lay the hope and the 
beginning of a new poetry. 

^ D. S. 20. 

'D. S. 212. 

'D. S. 99. 
'D. S. 99- 
'D. S. 135. 
'D. S. 167. 



Wordsworth's poetic development 95 

But it is in syntax, rather than in vocabulary, that 
Wordsworth is most original. His peculiarities in this 
respect are enumerated by M. Legouis: 'We find archa- 
isms in the forms of certain verbs^ ; verbs now neuter 
employed in an archaic sense as active- ; irregular suppres- 
sion of the article^; violent suppression of an auxiliary,* 
or of a verb^ ; employment of obsolete words,^ or of words 

^ As examples of such archaisms, M. Legouis cites the use of 
forgot for forgotten, broke for broken, ope for open, etc. Strictly 
speaking, these could hardly be called archaic forms in Wordsworth's 
time; both forms had existed side by side in poetry from the 
first, and had been used interchangeably by representative writers 
like Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Cowper. Indeed broke seems 
actually to be a later form than broken (see A^. E. D.), and forgot 
is the favorite form in Milton, Pope, and Cowper. Since Words- 
worth rejected the forms ope and broke (as a past participle) in 
all his poetry written after 1797, we may assume i-Vip^- he felt these 
forms to be, if not archaic, at least merely poetic. But this is not 
true of forgot (as a past participle), which he continues to use to 
the end. 

^ M. Legouis cites as examples the use of gase for gaae on (E. W. 
17-18, 57, 130), and to listen for listen to (E. W. 436). In these 
forms, Wordsworth is following the usage of Milton, as opposed 
to that of earlier poets like Shakespeare and Spenser (cf. P. L. 
8. 258, P. R. I. 414, Conius 551. The transitive use of ga:::e seems to 
be later than the intransitive form (see N. E. D.). M. Legouis adds : 
'Observe also the strained use, in an active sense, of to course 
(E. W. 31), to roam (E. W. 219), to rove (D.S. 80).' 

^As examples M. Legouis cites E. W. 121, 446; D. S. 228. 

^ As an example M. Legouis cites E. W. 226. Cf. Lines left upon 
a Seat in a Yew-tree 4. 'What if these barren boughs the bee not 
loves.' 

" The example given by M. Legouis, 'Spur-clad his nervous feet, 
and firm his tread' (£. W. 131) may not be felt by most English 
readers to be unusual. It is a construction common, not only in 
verse, but even in prose, though the usual order in prose would be 
'his nervous feet spur-clad,' etc. 

"" M. Legouis cites illume, for illumine, as an example of such obso- 
lete words. Like some of the other forms which M. Legouis calls 
archaic, illume is not a survival of an earlier word, but was a 
poetic form from the first, introduced later than the word which 



96 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

used in an obsolete sense, at times with a somewhat pedantic 
regard for etymology/ or of words exceedingly rare,^ if 
not newly coined^; abnormal constructions, for instance, 
the imitation of the ablative absolute, to which Milton was 
very partial*; misuse of the inversion which consists in 
making the subject follow the verb, by employing it without 
beginning the sentence with any of the adverbs that justify 
its use^ ; separation of relative and antecedent for the sake 
of elegance^; nouns in oblique cases placed before those 

M. Legouis believes to be its modern representative. *A poetical 
shortening of illumine,' says the A^. E. D. Like other poetic 
forms, this was later abandoned by Wordsworth. Outside of the 
poems of 1793, there is but one example of its use — in the line 
'An aspect tenderly illumined/ in the poem beginning 'Departing 
summer,' Oxford edition, p. 498. 

' M. Legouis cites, as examples, ruining for falling down (D. S. 
203), haply for perhaps {D. S. 410), hapless for unhappy (E. W. 
239), aspires for ascends (D. S. 732)- The use of ruining is prob- 
ably a reminiscence of P. L. 6. 868. Of haply the N. E. D. says, 
'Now archaic or poetic' But the word hapless is not so designated ; 
it is not infrequent in modern prose. 

^As examples M. Legouis cites viewless for invisible (E. W. 148; 
D. S. 36, 92, 227, 548, 648) ; moveless for jitotionless (E. W. 104, 206, 
D. S. 226, etc.) ; somhrous for dark (E. W. 72). Viewless and 
moveless are words to which Dorothy Wordsworth especially 
objected in her criticisms of the poems of 1793 (L. W. F. i. 50). 
Viewless immediately suggests Shakespeare's line, 'To be imprisoned 
in the viewless winds' (Meas. for Meas. 3. i. 124). It also occurs 
in the poetry of Milton (P. L. 3. 518; Comus 92, etc.). The cita- 
tions in the A^. E. D. illustrating the use of somhrous do not 
suggest that it is an obsolete word, or a word confined to verse. 
In Wordsworth's poetry it is used only in the Evening Walk. 

^As examples, M. Legouis cites unbreathing (D. S. 787), and 
unpathway'd for pathless (D. S. 285). 

^E. IV. 145. For the use of the ablative absolute in English, 
see Ross, 'The Absolute Participle in Middle and Modern English,' 
Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass. 8. 245 f¥. 

^M. Legouis cites E. W. 44, 70, 123, 230, 280, 365, 2>77, 428; D. S. 
18, 62, 65, 146-147, 217, 229, 287, 555, 566, 701. 

'E. W. 189. 



WORDSWORTH S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 97 

which govern them, a construction which Wordsworth man- 
ages with especial awkwardness, and never entirely dis- 
cards^; violent displacement of the direct complement, 
which is too short for the purpose, to make it precede the 
verb^; inversion of the direct pronominal object, with all the 
characteristics of one of Milton's Latin constructions,^ vari- 
ous uncommon elliptical constructions,* or odd inversions of 
different kinds^; adjectives arbitrarily made to do duty as 
adverbs®; substantives used as adjectives^; and compound 
words either very rare or of the poet's own invention.^ 

This curious style may be illustrated by the following 
passage^ : 

An idle voice the sabbath region fills 

Of Deep that calls to Deep across the hills, 

Broke only by the melancholy sound 

Of drowsy bells for ever tinkling round; 

Faint wail of eagle melting into blue 

Beneath the cliffs, and pine-woods steady sugh ; 

The solitary heifer's deepen'd low ; 

Or rumbling heard remote of falling snow. ^ 

'£. W. 321, D. S. 268, 390-391, 502. 
'D. S. 122, 255. 

'D.S. 45-47. ^ 

* E. IV. 94-95. 

^Z7. S. II-I2, 794. 

^E. W. 149, D. S. 2>77' Cf. Wordsworth's objection to fruitless 
for fruitlessly — Appendix on Poetic Diction. 

'£. W. 137, 153; D. S. 177, 299, 432, 558, 581, 697, 718, 720, 775, 
cited by M. Legouis. Cf. Wordsworth's later objection to this 
habit (Oxford edition, p. viii). 

® Cf . The Early Life of William Wordsworth, p. 135, foot note: 
'Every writer, whether of prose or of poetry, has a right to form 
new compound words, and it is needless to point out any but those 
which are somewhat obscure, or demand some investigation if they 
are to be understood. For example; 'ho Flow-parting oar,' i. e, 
forming a hollow in the water as well as dividing it (£. W. 439) ; 
'hollow-blustering coast,' i. e. sounding hollow beneath the sudden 
squall. Thomson had applied the same epithet to the mind 
{Winter 987).' 

"> D. S. 432-445- 



98 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Save that, the stranger seen below, the boy 
Shouts from the echoing hills with savage joy. 
When warm from myrtle bays and tranquil seas, 
Comes on, to whisper hope, the vernal breeze, 
When hums the mountain bee in May's glad ear, 
And emerald isles to spot the heights appear. 

Here, as may be seen at once, the fault lies, not in the 
choice of words, but in the syntax. The young poet is try- 
ing to employ in English the less restricted order of Latin 
verse. The awkward use of the participle in lines 434, 439, 
and 440 of this passage ; the separation of a word from its 
modifier in lines 432 and 433 ; and the placing of the verb 
before the subject, and the adverbial phrase before the verb 
which it completes, in lines 444 and 445 — these are all the 
result of disregarding the familiar conventions of the spoken 
English sentence, on which the intelligibility of our unin- 
flected speech is so largely dependent. Most of them may 
be paralleled in the poetry of Milton, from whom, indeed, a 
very large number of peculiar words and forms in these 
poems are directly borrowed. Milton, rather than the land- 
scape-school which M. Legouis assigns as the model of 
these poems, seems to be directly responsible for most of 
the vagaries of language in them. Despite Wordsworth's 
obvious indebtedness to his predecessors in the latter part 
of the eighteenth century, neither the faults nor the virtues 
of these descriptive poems are really representative of the 
type of poetic diction prevalent before him. As we have 
pointed out, the best achievement of the eighteenth century 
was a clear and natural order and syntax ; its worst achieve- 
ment was a set of periphrastic phrases, which did duty for 
simple words and original observations. Neither of these 
are characteristic of Wordsworth's Cambridge poems. A 
comparison of the verses already given as a specimen of the 
*gaudiness and inane phraseology' of Wordsworth's time 
with the passage from the Descriptive Sketches just quoted 
will establish the truth of this statement. The former is as 



WORDSWORTH S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 99 

superior in grammatical clearness and metrical ease as it is 
inferior in freshness and originality of substance and 
phrase. As far as the landscape-poets escaped from the 
style of the Augustan age, they attained to the clean-cut, 
though, for the most part, unambitious imagery, the sincere 
but gentle imaginative feeling, and the quiet melody, that 
are more characteristic of Wordsworth's school-boy work 
than of the Descriptive Sketches, which Coleridge likened 
to some gorgeous and knotty tropical growth. But, save 
for an occasional liberty borrowed from Milton or Spenser, 
the landscape-poets tended to preserve the grammatical 
structure which Dryden and his age had succeeded in 
establishing. 

Perhaps the use of absolute constructions in Pope's trans- 
lation of Homer, or Young's Night Thoughts, or the poetry 
of Thomson and Bowles, or a lapse from 'correctness' in 
the descriptive verse of Dyer, had encouraged Wordsworth 
in his reproduction of Milton's eccentricities ; but, for the 
most part, he seems to go back to the great original of these 
faults, and to copy him directly. As an example of this 
Miltonic influence, we may cite the use of gaze^ and listen^ 
as transitive verbs, contrary to the usage of Spenser and 
Shakespeare; of ruin as an intransitive verb — 

And, ruining from the cliffs, their deafening load 
Tumbles,^ 

with which we may compare Milton's line. 

Hell saw 
Heaven ruining from Heaven*; 

the quasi-adverbial use of remote in the line, 'Or rumbling 
heard remote of falling snow,'^ which echoes the lines in 
Paradise Lost: 

'E. IV. 57, 130; D. S. 556-557. 
'E. W. 436. 
'D. S. 203. 
'P. L. 6. 868. 
'D.S. 439. 



loo Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Their rising all at once was as the sound 
Of thunder heard remote^; 

the frequent use of the phrase, 'bosom'd deep/^ in imitation 
of Milton's 'bosom'd high in tufted trees,' etc.^ 

Although the influence of Milton, and the practice of 
writing in Latin, seem to be responsible for the mannerisms 
of the descriptive poems, this early difficulty with syntax 
is characteristic of Wordsworth. It is due to the same 
tendency that makes his critical utterances obscure — the 
tendency of his intellectual ideas to become involved with 
intense emotional and imaginative associations, which his 
readers do not always share. Sometimes, in his later blank 
verse, it was as difficult for Wordsworth to go straight to 
the point in a sentence as it was for him to go straight to 
the climax in a narrative. The thought was sufficiently 
clear and energetic ; it did not lose sight of the final goal ; 
but it carried so much weight that the movement was some- 
what impeded. It is necessary to recognize this difficulty 
in making use of the clear but limited sentence-structure 
of the eighteenth century, when it first appears in Words- 
worth's poetry, because it explains some of his later experi- 
ments. Dryden and his followers had rendered an essential 
service, by making the written language correspond more 
nearly to the structure of the spoken language; but their 
syntax was too impassioned, too inexpressive, for Words- 
worth's freer and bolder genius. He needed a more flexible 
instrument, and, in the end, he found it. 

But if Wordworth's syntax is peculiar, his figures of 
speech are more so. ^Instances of personification, which in 
Collins and Gray are already plentiful, swarm in the Eve- 
ning Walk and the Descriptive Sketches. Impatience, "pant- 
ing upward," climbs mountains* ; obsequious Grace pursues 

^P. L. 2. 477. 

'£. W. 13; D. S. 81; cf. U Allegro 78. 

^ The use of erroneous, D. S. 689, suggests Milton, P. L. 7. 20. 

'£.^.35. 



WORDSWORTH S POETIC DEVELOPMENT lOI 

the male swan on the lake, while tender Cares and domestic 
Loves swim in pursuit of the female^; Pain has a sad 
family- ; Independence is the child of Disdain^ ; Hope leans 
ceaselessly on Pleasure's funereal urn*; Consumption, 
"with cheeks o'erspread by smiles of baleful glow," passes 
through the villages of France on a pale horse^ ; "Oppres- 
sion builds her thick-ribb'd tow'rs" ; Machination flees 
"panting to the centre of her mines"; Persecution decks 
her bed (of torture) with ghastly smiles; Ambition piles 
up mountains, etc.^ . . . The poet's fancy becomes still 
more whimsical when he attributes human or animal charac- 
teristics, not to abstractions which he can endow with any 
form he pleases, but to objects or phenomena so familiar to 
us that our knowledge of their nature protests against 
such a travesty. The blood which flows from the wounded 
feet of the chamois-hunter is "Lapp'd by the panting tongue 
of thirsty skies."^ The mountain-shadow creeps toward the 
crest of the hill "with tortoise foot."^ "Silent stands th' 
admiring vale" (i. e. the villagers).^ Frequently false 
pathos is mingled with these effects. An old man's lyre is 
itself not old, but aged}^ The Grand Chartreuse, hoary with 
snow, weeps "beneath his chill of mountain gloom. "^^ And 
these constantly recurring personifications extend even to 
the grammar. The neuter gender tends to disappear,^- and 

^ E. W. 200, 206-207. 

^ D. S. 2. (taken from Pope, Essay on Man 2. no). 
'D. S. 323-324. 
*D. S. 518. 
^D. S. 788-791. 
^D. S. 792-804. 
'D. S. 397. 
'D. S. 105. 
'E. W. 188. 
^'D. S. 171. 
"£>. 6". 54. 

"^ Beacon (E. W. 189); steep (E. W. 156); mountain (£. W. 
336-339), etc., are masculine. 



I02 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

the genitive case/ commonly used only in reference to liv- 
ing beings, is curiously applied to words of every sort.' 

This attempt to present everything by an image M. 
Legouis ascribes to the influence of Darwin. This may be 
true; but it is doubtful whether the passage in the Bio- 
graphia Liferaria on which M. Legouis bases this conclusion 
can refer to Wordsworth. Coleridge is speaking of 
admirers of Darwin with whom he used to dispute in his 
early Cambridge days.^ At this time he did not know 
Wordsworth; and when the two young men met, Words- 
worth had already recovered from any infatuation for verse 
of the type of the Botanic Garden — if he ever felt it. 
Besides, in the note to the Descriptive Sketches, which is 
his only critical utterance before the time of the Lyrical 
Ballads, he protests against Darwin's favorite term, pic- 
turesque, with considerable energy. 

But whether Wordsworth is influenced by Darwin or not, 
his personifications are very different from most con- 
temporary figures of this sort, including those of the 
Botanic Garden. To find anything really parallel to them 
we must go back to the metaphysical poets. As Coleridge 
noticed, the chief difficulty with the personifications of the 
eighteenth century is that they remain abstractions. The 
only sign of the supposed humanity (or divinity in the 
shape of humanity) of all these figures — Floras, Cynthias, 
Hopes, and Loves — of the period is the conventional symbol 
of the capital letter and some equally conventional adjec- 
tive — pale Cynthia, blushing Flora, etc. Though Darwin 
makes a special effort to give human personalities to all 
his vegetable lovers, he does so mainly by a more liberal 

^ E. W. 76, 51; D. S. 274, 153, 225. Wordsworth never did share 
Coleridge's objection to this use of the genitive. See the many 
awkward examples of it under with words like edge {'lake's edge,' 
etc.) in the Concordance. 

^B.L. I. 12. 



Wordsworth's poetic development 103 

use of general periphrastic terms, rather than by clearly 
individualizing the image: 

How the young rose, in beauty's damask pride. 
Drinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride.' 

With Wordsworth it is quite different. In the first 
place, his personifications are distinguished from similar 
figures in most contemporary verse by the fact that he gives 
abstractions and inanimate things the personalities of the 
lower animals, rather than of divine beings. Peace is a red- 
breast^; Hope is a lark^ ; Reason may be a dog*; the 
evening shadows come down the vale on the wings of 
Beattie's owP; etc. No doubt he felt better acquainted 
with animals than with 'heavenly maids.' The result of 
this is sometimes rather strange ; but it is certainly a sign 
of the almost unconscious originality of the youthful poet. 
Moreover, he realizes his images intensely, even at the risk 
of being somewhat ridiculous. He is not content to speak 
vaguely of 'pale Cynthia.' When the image of the pale lady 
is suggested to his mind, it immediately becomes a separate 
and living entity. For example, he writes of the moon : 

By the deep quiet gloom appall'd, she sighs, 
Stoops her sick head, and shuts her weary eyes.^ 

Though the propriety of the image may certainly be ques- 
tioned, there is no doubt that 'pale Cynthia' is a distinct 
person in the poet's imagination. Sometimes the reference 

^ Darwin, Loves of the Plants i. 17-18. 

'D. S. 169. 

'D. S. 632. 

*D. S. 56. 

'£. W. 191-192. Cf. the stanza quoted from Beattie's poem. 
Retirement, in A Cento made by Wordsworth (Oxford edition, 
p. 626). 

"^D. S. 221-222. 



I04 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

to the lady is more happy — as in that beautiful passage 
from the Evening Walk, which may be quoted in full, 
because in it are concentrated many of the finest character- 
istics of these poems : 

The bird, with fading light who ceas'd to thread 

Silent the hedge or steaming rivulet's bed, 

From his grey re-appearing tower shall soon 

Salute with boding note the rising moon. 

Frosting with hoary light the pearly ground, 

And pouring deeper blue to Other's bound ; 

Rejoic'd her solemn pomp of clouds to fold 

In robes of azure, fleecy white, and gold. 

While rose and poppy, as the glow-worm fades, 

Checquer with paler red the thicket shades. 

Now o'er the eastern hills, where Darkness broods 

O'er all its vanish'd dells, and lawns, and woods 

Where but a mass of shade the sight can trace. 

She lifts in silence up her lovely face; 

Above the gloomy valley flings her light. 

Far to the western slopes with hamlets white; 

And gives, where woods the checquer'd upland strew, 

To the green corn of summer autumn's hue. 

But the artistic originality of this early work is not to 
be measured by its quaint exaggerations. In the passage 
just quoted (and this is thoroughly typical) there is some- 
thing that at once explains the passionate enthusiasm with 
which Coleridge hailed the new genius. In the first place 
there is the accurate observation of the natural features, 
not as dead or static, but in their living and changing rela- 
tions to each other — in the image of the grey re-appear- 
ing tower, the fading of the glow-worm, the appearance 
of the pale-red roses and poppies in the thicket, etc. 
His first poetic impulse had come to him when he noticed 
how the sunset radiance changed and glorified the familiar 
face of common things. The artistic motive thus suggested 
to him at fourteen is everywhere present in these early 

'E. W. 389-406. 



Wordsworth's poetic development 105 

poems, not only in the subtle observations of the Evening 
Walk, but in the splendid climaxes of light and color in the 
Descriptive Sketches. 

Perhaps it was this same experience that first stimulated 
Wordsworth's special interest in color, characteristic of the 
time when he was 

Bent over much on superficial things, 
Pampering myself with meagre novelties 
Of color and proportion. 

Later, as Miss Pratt says of Wordsworth's mature poetry,' 
'in contrast with the voice of wind and stream, forms and 
colors were to him external quahties, Nature's dress rather 
than the utterance of her life ; and for this reason, though 
they appealed to Wordsworth's eye and were mingled with 
happy memories, they meant less and less to him as his 
mind became m.ore mature and more watchful for 'the 
latent qualities and essences of things." ' 

This is true; but it becomes still more significant when 
we note, as Miss Pratt has failed to do,^ the remarkable 
splendor and variety of color in these poems, whose lavish- 
ness in this respect can be paralleled only in the early work 
of Keats. Purity and self-restraint are the more notable 
where the energies are warm and powerful; and Words- 
worth's later preference for the quiet green tints of field 
and wood is the more interesting when we perceive how his 
early poems flame with scarlet and gold — how he loves the 
light and fire of the setting sun more than all the secret 
and shadowy beauties of nature. 

^ Color in English Romantic Poetry, pp. 55-56. 

- She notes that the early poems of Wordsworth employ color 
as lavishly as do the early poems of Keats (p. 57), who 'in wealth 
of color stands without a peer' (p. 88) ; but she fails to note the 
effectiveness and the originality of the color. The color of the 
young Wordsworth is imaginative, where that of the young Keats 
is merely decorative. 



io6 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

This interest in color is paralleled by an interest in 
sound — visible not only in successful attempts to differ- 
entiate the various notes and voices, but in an effort to 
make the sound an echo to the sense. In later years, 
although Wordsworth always tried to give melody and 
harmony to his verse, and was almost painfully conscious 
of an unpleasant jarring of sounds, he was not inclined to 
use the device of onomatopoeia. In these early poems, how- 
ever, there are many interesting examples of it. One of the 
most original of these is the line : 'Glad in their airy baskets, 
hang and sing'^ ; but there are many more obvious efforts : — 

the silver'd kite 
In many a whistling circle wheels her flight^ 
With pensive step to measure my slow way^ 
Sound of clos'd gate across the water borne/ 
Hurrying the feeding hare through rustling corn.^ 
The distant forge's swinging thump profound.* 

To achieve such effects in the metre of the heroic couplet 
was something of a triumph. Like everything else in the 
poems, they are not so much an imitation of an old form 
as the promise of a new, and point to the emergence above 
the horizon, not only of a new and vital genius, but of a 
very self-conscious artist. 

4. Study and Self -Criticism. 

No sooner had these efforts appeared than Wordsworth 
began to see their defects. In this he was greatly assisted 
by the candor of his family — not only of Dorothy, but of 
Christopher — then an undergraduate at Cambridge, who 

'E. W. 150. 
'E. W. 90. 
'D. S. 165. 
*E. W. 441. 
'£. W. 442. 
'E. W. 445- 



Wordsworth's poetic development 107 

here exercises for the first and last time, a vital influence 
on his brother's work. Dorothy and 'Kit' went through 
the poem, analyzing it line by line, and embodying their 
opinions in a bulky criticism which Christopher withheld 
until he could add the remarks of a friend at Cambridge.^ 
This friend was very likely Coleridge. He and Christopher 
belonged to the same literary society, which discussed Wil- 
liam's poems among other things; and in Christopher's 
diary he is the one member of the society whose opinions 
are especially quoted." 

Christopher also seems to have noticed the criticism of 
his brother's verse in the Monthly Review} The Monthly 
Reviewer was a stupid person, who probably did not take 
the trouble to read the poems through; but he made one 
remark which seems to have sunk deep into Wordsworth's 
consciousness. He advised him and every other young 
maker of verses to look at his own thoughts until he was 
sure he imderstood them. No one could be a poet until 
'his mind is strong enough to sustain this labor.' Long 
afterward W^ordsworth gave to young William Rowan 
Hamilton the advice which he himself had received from 
this otherv,ase rather undiscerning critic* 

As a result of all these candid opinions, Wordsworth at 
once set to work to alter the poems. In 1794 he writes to 
Mathews that he has been correcting and adding to the 
verse published the preceding year, and remarks that he is 
sorry that he huddled the pieces into the world in so imper- 
fect a form. 'But as I had done nothing by which to dis- 

^L. W.F. I. 51-52. 

^Social Life at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury. See the reprint of Christopher's diary in the Appendix. 

^Monthly Review 12. 216-218. 

* L. IV. F. 2. 313. After analyzing Hamilton's verses as the critic 
in the Monthly Review had analyzed the Descriptive Sketches, 
Wordsworth remarks : The logical faculty has infinitely more to do 
with poetry than the young and inexperienced, whether writer or 
critic, ever dreams of.' 



io8 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

tinguish myself at the university/ he says/ *I thought these 
Httle things might show that I could do something. They 
have been treated with unmerited contempt by some of the 
periodical publications, and others have spoken of them in 
higher terms than they deserve/ 

According to Wordsworth's own statement, the result of 
these corrections is embodied in the version printed in 1820. 
Because of the poet's tendency to be a little inaccurate with 
regard to dates, and to keep retouching all his work even 
while it was going through the press, it is the custom to 
doubt his word in such matters. But it happens that the 
faults corrected in the version of 1820 are exactly the faults 
which he carefully avoids in his next effort — Guilt and 
Sorrow; and for the original form of this latter poem we 
have the testimony of Coleridge. Hence we seem to be 
justified in accepting Wordsworth's own statement. In the 
version of 1820 the structure of the language is somewhat 
improved; a few objectionable words or forms (such as 
gase used as a transitive verb) are omitted; and some 
excellent lines are added. But the really notable feature 
is the uncompromising ejection of almost everything in the 
nature of a personification. In the first seventy lines of 
the Evening Walk, for instance, Mirth, Memory, soft Affec- 
tion, and Quiet all disappear. Sometimes several lines are 
forced to disappear with them. Sometimes the change is 
more easily effected. Instead of 'soft Affection's ear' 
Wordsworth merely says 'unreluctant ear'; for the line 
'Then Quiet led me up the huddling rill,' he writes 'Then, 
while I wandered up the huddling rill,' etc. 

But while he was thus improving his technique, Words- 
worth was also developing a theory of fine art. To the 
Monthly Miscellany, which he and Mathews were planning 
to edit, he was willing to contribute 'critical remarks upon 
Poetry, etc., etc. ; upon the arts of Painting, Gardening, and 

'L. W.F. I. 67. 



WORDSWORTH S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 1 09 

other subjects of amusement.'^ If only these remarks had 
been written ! We have almost no means of knowing what 
the substance of them would have been. Wordsworth's few 
early letters are notably lacking in literary criticism. All 
that is known is that he read John Scott of Amwell, whose 
emphasis upon clear and distinct imagery and desire 
to enrich poetry with new rural images must have coin- 
cided with Wordsworth's own boyish ambition. Besides 
the reference to Scott in the notes to the Evening Walk,^ 
there is only one other indication that Wordsworth had 
been reflecting on the nature of fine art. In a note to the 
Descriptive Sketches he makes an emphatic protest against 
the Darwinian theory that poetry is painting in words, of 
which M. Legouis seems to consider him an adherent at this 
time : *I had once given to these sketches the title of Pictur- 
esque; but the Alps are insulted in applying to them that 
term. Whoever, in attempting to describe their sublime 
features, should confine himself to the cold rules of paint- 
ing would give his reader but a very imperfect idea of 
those emotions which they have the irresistible power of 
communicating to the most impassive imaginations. The 
fact is, that controuling influence, which distinguishes the 
Alps from all other scenery, is derived from images which 
disdain the pencil. Had I wished to make a picture of this 
scene I had thrown much less light into it. But I con- 
sulted nature and my own feelings. The ideas excited by 
the stormy sunset I am here describing owe their sublimity 
to that deluge of light, or rather of fire, in which nature had 
wrapped the immense forms around me; any intrusion 
of shade, by destroying the unity of the impression, had 
necessarily diminished its grandeur.'^ 

Perhaps this is the beginning of the theory of imagina- 
tion which he and Coleridge later developed together. He 

'L. W.F. 1.66. 

^ Oxford edition, p. 595. 

' Ibid. p. 608. 



no WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

had already begun to assert the right and power of the 
imagination to modify and combine visual images in 
accordance with the dictates of impassioned feeling. 

But, whatever Wordsworth's theories may have been at 
this time, the result of all this critical effort is visible in 
his next poem, which may best be described in Coleridge's 
glowing words^ : 'I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I 
had the happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth personally, 
and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden 
effect produced on my mind by his recitation of a manu- 
script poem, which still remains unpublished, but of which 
the stanza, and tone of the style, were the same as those 
of the "Female Vagrant," as originally printed in the first 
volume of the "Lyrical Ballads." There was here no mark 
of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbu- 
lence of imagery; and, as the poet hath himself well 
described in his lines "on revisiting the Wye," manly reflec- 
tion, and human associations had given both variety and 
additional interest to natural objects, which in the passion 
and appetite of the first love they had seemed to him neither 
to needN or permit. The occasional obscurities, which had 
arisen from an imperfect controul over the resources of 
his native language, had almost wholly disappeared, 
together with that worst defect of arbitrary and illogical 
phrases at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so 
distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, 
and will, more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest 
genius, unless the attention has been specifically directed to 
the worthlessness and incongruity. I did not perceive any- 
thing particular in the mere style of the poem alluded to 
during its recitation, except indeed such difference as was 
not separable from the thought and manner; and the 
Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to 
the reader's mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless 

'B.L. I. 59. 



Wordsworth's poetic development in 

have authorized, in my then opinion, a more frequent 
descent to the phrases of ordinary hfe, than could without 
an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It 
was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as 
to common defects, or to those more properly his own, 
which made so unusual an impression on my feelings imme- 
diately, and subsequently on my judgment. It was the 
union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine 
balance of truth in observing with imaginative faculty in 
modifying the objects observed; and above all the original 
gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it all the 
depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, 
and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had 
bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the 
dew drops. ^ 

Thus, as early as 1796, Wordsworth had attained to an 
austere and imaginative simplicity of style. A slight 
awkwardness of language was still visible, but the extrane- 
ous and exaggerated ornaments were gone. As far as 
can be determined, this improvement was solely on the 
basis of reading confined, in the field of EngHsh literature, 
to the poets of the eighteenth century and the three great 
elder bards — Milton, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Apart 
from these, he had been especially interested in Italian and 
Latin poetry. During his Cambridge days he had read 
Ariosto and Tasso with such enthusiasm that, when he first 
went to France, his mind was more often preoccupied with 
thoughts of Erminia and Angelica than with the philosoph- 
ical dialogues of Beaupuy." In the years between the pub- 

'The language is still a little unidiomatic. The inversions are 
numerous, as in 100, 159, 170, 185, 278, 330, z^7, 547, etc. The 
article is frequently omitted, as in 99, 135, 136, 140, 142, 144, 187, 
etc. The auxiliary is omitted now and then, as in 3, 48, etc. There 
is also a large number of places in which a participle or noun in 
apposition is awkwardly used, as in 10, 66, 72, 148, etc. 

^Prelude 9. 437-453. Concerning Wordsworth's Italian studies, 
see also Memoirs i. 14. 



112 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

lication of the descriptive poems and the meeting with 
Coleridge he had apparently turned back to the Latin 
authors, especially Horace and Juvenal. One of the pas- 
sages added to the Evening Walk^ is based on Horace ; and 
the special literary enterprise of this period was a transla- 
tion of Juvenal which he and Wrangham were making 
together.^ Perhaps Mathews also took some interest in 
this; at least a copy of Juvenal was presented to Words- 
worth by Mathews.^ But of the special literary models of 
the Lyrical Ballads — the poetry of Chaucer, the Reliques 
of Ancient Poetry, and the literature before Dryden — we 
hear not a word. However, the source of this new influence 
at once becomes clear when we consider what Lamb and 
Coleridge had been doing up to this time. 

^ See the final version of the Evening Walk, 72-85 (Oxford edi- 
tion, p. 3). This appears in the edition of 1820 as it is here written. 
It was probably one of those additions 'made shortly after publi- 
cation' in 1793. 

^L.W.F.i. 87-89, 92-98. 

^ This is now in the library of Mrs. Henry St, John, Ithaca, N. Y. 



CHAPTER 4. 

COLERIDGE AND HIS CIRCLE. 

While Wordsworth was thus attaining to the practice of 
simpUcity, Coleridge and Lamb had been developing the 
theory of it; and were reUgiously seeking out literary 
models of a style more pure and plain. The beginnings of 
this effort, which ended in the Lyrical Ballads, are to be 
found in the teaching of their doughty old schoolmaster 
at Christ's Hospital— the Rev. James Boyer.^ *He early 
moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to 
Cicero, of Homer and Theocrites to Virgil, and again of 
Virgil to Ovid,' writes Coleridge.^ 'He habituated me to 
compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read), 
Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not 
only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and 
brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan era; 
and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see 
and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and 
nativeness, both of their thoughts and diction. ... In 
our own English compositions, (at least for the last three 
years of our school education,) he showed no mercy to 
phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, 
or where the same sense might have been conveyed with 
equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and 
lyre. Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, 
and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. In fancy 
I can almost hear him now, exclaiming ''Harp? Harpf 
Lyre? Pen and ink, hoy, you mean! Muse, boy, Musef 

' 'Lamb speaks of himself as only a Deputy Grecian, and yet there 
is no doubt that he enjoyed the advantage of Boyer's tuition, even 
although that masterful instructor reserved his highest enthusiasm 
for Grecians absolute.'— Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb i. 74- 

'B.L. 1.4-5. 



114 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring f Oh 
aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" ' 

Although for a time the youthful Coleridge neglected 
literature for philosophy, he did not forget the teaching of 
these early days. When the sonnets of Bowles appeared, he 
at once hailed them as models of simplicity and tenderness, 
and quite forgot the mysteries of Neoplatonism in his 
proselyting enthusisam for what seemed to him a new type 
of poetry.^ As a matter of fact, Bowles was not very new. 
His verse alternately echoes Milton's minor poems and the 
sweeter cadences of Shakespeare — not to mention his 
master, Warton. But his pure and slender melodies fell 
gratefully upon the ear after the couplets of Pope and 
Erasmus Darwin. 

Naturally Coleridge, with the conversational zeal for dis- 
seminating knowledge which marked him even then, enthu- 
siastically recommended Bowles upon all occasions. In so 
doing he developed a whole theory of criticism, in which 
we already find dim intimations of the Preface to the 
Lyrical Ballads. The lively discussions begun then, and 
continued with renewed vigor after he met Wordsworth, 
are best described in his own words^ : 'Among those with 
whom I conversed, there were, of course, very many who 
had formed their taste and their notions of poetry, from 
the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more 
generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and 
invigorated by English understanding, which had pre- 
dominated from the last century. I was not blind to the 
merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of the 
world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general 
subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I 
doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption 
of youth withheld from its masters the legitimate name of 
poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in 

^B. L. I. 7-10. 
'Ibid. I. 1 1 -14. 



COLERIDGE AND HIS CIRCLE II5 

just and acute observations on men and manners in an 
artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and 
in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epi- 
grammatic couplets, as its form. Even when the subject 
was addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape 
of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a 
consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of 
matchless talent and ingenuity. Pope's translation of the 
Iliad ; still a point was looked for at the end of each second 
line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I may 
exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunc- 
tion disjunctive, of epigram.s. Meantime the matter and 
diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic 
thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of 
poetry. On this last point, I had occasion to render my own 
thoughts gradually more and more plain to myself, by 
frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's Botanic 
Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not 
only by the reading public in general, but even by those, 
whose genius and natural robustness of understanding 
enabled them afterwards to act foremost in dissipating 
these "painted mists" tliat occasionally rise from the 
marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cam- 
bridge vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a 
literary society in Devonshire: and in this I remember to 
have compared Darwin's work to the Russian palace of 
ice, glittering, cold, and transitory. In the same essay, too, 
I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a com- 
parison of passages in the Latin poets with the original 
Greek, from which they were borrowed, for the preference 
of CoUins's odes to those of Gray; and of the simile in 
Shakespeare 

How like a younker or a prodigal, 
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay, 
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind ! 
How like the prodigal doth she return, 



Il6 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails, 
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind !^ 

SO the imitation in The Bard ; 

Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows 
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm 
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, 
Youth at the prow and Pleasure at the helm; 
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, 
That hush'd in grim repose, expects its evening 
prey.- 

(in which, by the by, the words ''realm" and "sway" are 
rhymes dearly purchased). I preferred the original on the 
ground, that in the imitation it depended wholly on the 
compositor's putting, or not putting, a small Capital, both 
in this, and in many other passages of the same poet, 
whether the words should be personifications, or mere 
abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various 
lines in Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, 
and in the clear perception how completely all the propriety 
was lost in the transfer; I was, at that early period, led 
to a conjecture, which, many years afterwards, was 
recalled to me from the same thought having been started 
in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more 
fully, by Mr. Wordsworth; — namely, that this style of 
poetry, which I have characterized above, as translations 
of prose thoughts into poetic language, had been kept up 
by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing 
Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these 
exercises in our public schools. Whatever might have been 
the case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin 
tongue was so general among learned men, that Erasmus 
is said to have forgotten his native language; yet, in the 
present day it is not to be supposed that a youth can think 

^Merchant of Venice 2. 6. 14-19. 
' The Bard 70-75. 



COLERIDGE AND HIS CIRCLE II7 

in Latin, or that he can have any other rehance on the force 
or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer 
from whence he has adopted them.^ Consequently he must 
first prepare his thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, 
Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more compendiously from his 
Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to embody 
them. 

'I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in 
a young man from the age of seventeen to that of four or 
five and twenty, provided I find him always arguing on one 
side of the question. The controversies, occasioned by my 
unfeigned zeal for the honor of a favorite contemporary, 
then known to me only by his works, were of great advan- 
tage, in the formation and establishment of my taste and 
critical opinions. In my defence of the lines running into 
each other, instead of closing at each couplet, and of 
natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar, neither 
redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as / zvill 
remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in 
the rag-fair finery of, 

thy image on her wing 
Before my Fancy's eye shall Memory bring, 

I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the 
Greek poets from Homer to Theocritus inclusive ; and still 
more of our elder English poets from Chaucer to Milton. 
Nor was this all. But as it was my constant reply to 
authorities brought against me from later poets of great 
name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth, 
Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; 
actuated too by my former passion for metaphysical inves- 
tigations; I labored at a solid foundation, in which 
permanently to ground my opinions, in the component 
faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative 
dignity of importance.' 

'Cf. Prelude 6. 105-115. 



ii8 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

We might be tempted to think that Coleridge was trans- 
ferring his later opinions to these earlier days were it not 
for an abundance of contemporary testimony concerning 
these enthusiastic conversations. 'Coleridge talked Greek/ 
remarks Christopher Wordsworth^ (in describing a meet- 
ing at which *Dr. Darwin, Miss Seward, Mrs. Smith, 
Bowles, and my Brother' were discussed), 'and spouted out 
of Bowles.' 'My poetical taste was much mehorated by 
Bowles,' writes Southey in 1795,^ 'and the constant com- 
pany of Coleridge,' who probably 'spouted out of Bowles' 
in Southey's presence also. But it is in the letters of Lamb 
to Coleridge, just before the close association between 
Wordsworth and Coleridge began, and in the new Monthly 
Magazine, for which this group of ambitious young poets 
were writing, that we find the clearest indications of the 
theories of the Lyrical Ballads. 

'Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge,' is the burden of Lamb's 
letters. 'Banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs 
spontaneous from the heart and carries into daylight its 
own modest buds, and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers 
of expression. I allow no hot-beds in the garden of 
Parnassus.'^ The simplicity which he so much admired in 
Bowles, Lamb found also in Burns and Cowper, and in the 
genuinely imaginative figures and personifications of 'our 
elder bards,' whom he wished Coleridge to strive to bring 
'into more general fame.'* The simplicity he loves is not 
the elegant simplicity of Pope; it is naive and quaint and 
homely. At one time he remarks, apropos of a sonnet of 
his own: 'Your ears are not so very fastidious; many 
people would not like words so prosaic and familiar in a 
sonnet as Islington and Hertfordshire.'^ But Coleridge 

^ See the diary of Christopher Wordsworth, in the Appendix to 
Social Life at the English Universities. 
^ Life and Correspondence i. 247. 
^Letters, i. 48. 
* Ibid. I. 4. 24-26, 28. 
'Ibid. I. 4. 



COLERIDGE AND HIS CIRCLE II9 

had already expressed his Hking for the real names of real 
things and people in more violent terms. 'For God's sake,' 
he writes to South ey in 1794/ 'let us have no more Bions 
or Gracchus's I abominate them ! Southey is a name much 
more proper and handsome, and, I venture to prophecy, 
will be more famous/ Lamb's remarks on simplicity he 
seemis to have received with humility. *As to my own 
poetry,' he wrote to Thelwell, 'I do confess that it fre- 
quently, both in thought and language, deviates from 
"nature and simplicity," ' adding, characteristically, that 
Bowles is, with the exception of Burns, the only 'always 
natural poet' in our language.^ 

But meanwhile this new criticism was not modestly con- 
cealing itself from the public eye. Southey displayed the 
taste which had been 'meliorated' by Coleridge in some 
poetry that brought down on the head of him and his 
revolutionary friend the rather paternal admonitions of the 
Critical Review.^ The Critical Review exactly represents 
the conventional attitude with regard to poetic diction. It 
is willing to grant that 'poetry has a language peculiar to 
itself which excuses a very few deviations from the normal 
structure of prose; but this must not be carried too far. 
'An occasional transposition creates variety and beauty. 
Mr. Southey gives frequent examples of this, by transpos- 
ing the usual order of the verb and the nominative case. 
But we would advise him and Mr. Coleridge to introduce 
this practice with prudence, and but sparingly; otherwise 
they will rather obscure than illumine their verse and lose 
the charm of variety.' Having censured Southey for being 
too poetical in his syntax, the critic proceeds to remark 
that he is too prosaic in his tone. 'One leading rule for the 
style of poetry is that it should rise above the mere narrative 
of prose. Mr. Southey's lines are frequently prosaic, and 

^ The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge i. no. 

^ Ibid. I. 196. 

' 17. 187 — a review of Southey's Joan of Arc. 



I20 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

sometimes cannot even be read as verse.' This is exactly 
the attitude of the eighteenth century — ^no Uberties with 
order, grammar, and syntax ; but a vocabulary raised above 
prose, and verse that always scans in the one approved 
fashion. The critic also doubts whether Southey and 
Coleridge are justified in seeking variety of metre, citing 
for disapproval the lines; 

Now was the noon of night, and all was still, 
Save where the sentinel paced on his watch 
Humming a broken tune. 

Such liberties, says the critic, 'grate on a correct ear.' He 
hopes Mr. Southey and Mr. Coleridge will be more careful 
in the future. 

To such criticism as this Coleridge made a saucy 
reply. In the Monthly Magazine, whose aim was to print 
good articles that no other periodical would take, and to 
improve the quality of verse, he prints a rather charming 
little idyll, and entitles it: Reflections on entering Active 
Life, A Poem which affects not to he Poetry} Though 
affecting not to be poetry, the poem is certainly worthy of 
quotation in full. But only the first few lines of it can be 
given here : 

Low was our pretty cot ; the tallest rose 
Peep'd at our chamber-window. We could hear 
(At silent noon, and eve, and early morn) 
The sea's faint murmur ; in the open air 
Our myrtles blossom'd, and across the porch 
Thick jasmines twin'd: the little landscape round 
Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye. 

Here is the simplicity of style that Wordsworth was later 
to make famous ! 

About the same time there appeared in the Monthly 
Magazine a brief but very able article,- in which the sub- 

^ The Monthly Magazine 2. 732, 

^'Is Verse Essential to Poetry'? (2. 452). 



COLERIDGE AND HIS CIRCLE * T2I 

stance of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and the 
Appendix on Poetic Diction is plainly anticipated. 
Whether Coleridge was responsible for it or not, it cer- 
tainly reflects his opinions at this time. Verse, the writer 
decides, is not essential to poetry. The arguments with 
which he supports this thesis must be quoted at some length : 
'Those writers appear to have approached nearest to a true 
definition of poetry, who have understood it to be the imme- 
diate offspring of a vigorous imagination and quick sensi- 
bility, and have called it the language of fancy and 
passion.^ ... In a rude state of nature, before the art 
of versification was known, men felt strong passions and 
expressed them strongly.- Their language would be bold 
and figurative; it would be vehement and abrupt; some- 
times under the impulse of the gentle and the tender, or 
the gay and joyous passions, it w^ould flow in a kind of wild 
and unfettered melody, for under such impressions, melody 
is natural to man. . . . The character of poetry, which 
may seem most to require that it be limited to verse is its 
appropriate diction. It will be admitted that metaphorical 
language, being more impressive than general terms, is best 
suited to poetry. That excited state of mind, which poetry 
supposes, naturally prompts a figurative style. But the 
language of fancy, sentiment, and passion is not peculiar 
to verse. Whatever is the natural and proper expression 
of any conception or feeling in metre is its natural and 
proper expression in prose.^ All beyond this is a departure 

^ 'For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful 
feeling.' — Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. 

' The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion 
excited by real events. . . . Feeling powerfully as they did, their 
language was daring and figurative.' — Appendix to the Lyrical 
Ballads, 1802. 

' 'A large portion of every good poem can in no respect dififer 
from that of prose. ... It may be safely affirmed that there 
neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language 
of prose and metrical composition.' — Ibid. 1802. 



122 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

from the true principles of taste. If the artificial diction 
of modern poetry would be improper on similar occasions 
in prose, it is equally improper in verse. In support of this 
opinion, the appeal may be made, not only to the general 
sense of impropriety, but to those most perfect models of 
fine writing, the Greek poets. The language of these great 
masters is always so consonant to nature, that, thrown out 
of rhythm, it would become the proper expression of the 
same sentiment in prose. If modern poetry will seldom bear 
to be brought to the same taste [test?], it is because the taste 
of the modern has been refined to a degree of fastidious- 
ness which leads them to prefer the meretricious ornaments 
of art to the genuine simplicity of nature. ... It 
obviously follows from the point established in this paper 
that the terms poetry and prose are incorrectly opposed to 
each other. Verse is properly the contrary of prose; and 
because poetry speaks the language of passion and senti- 
ment, and philosophy speaks the language of reason, these 
two terms should be considered as contraries, and writing 
should be divided, not into poetry and prose, but into poetry 
and philosophy.'^ 

This is obviously the germ of the Preface to the Lyrical 
Ballads. But there is another interesting connection 
between the Monthly Magazine of 1796 and the Lyrical 
Ballads. In March of this year appeared William Taylor's 
translation of Biirger's Lenore into the language of Percy's 
Reliques. Lamb, always on the lookout for poetry that met 
his ideal of imaginative simplicity, eagerly called Coleridge's 
attention to it : 'Have you seen the ballad called "Leonore" 
in the second number of the Monthly Magazine f he 

^ 'I here use the word Poetry (though against my own judg- 
ment) as opposed to the word Prose, and synonymous with metrical 
composition. But much confusion has been introduced into criti- 
cism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the 
more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science. 
The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre.' — Note to the Preface 
to the Lyrical Ballads. 



COLERIDGE AND HIS CIRCLE 1 23 

writes.^ 'If you have !!!!!!!! There is another fine 
song, from the same author (Berger) in the 3'^ No., of 
scarce inferior merit.' This translation made me a poet, said 
Scott. It is very likely that it made Wordsworth and 
Coleridge the poets of the Lyrical Ballads. If so, we have 
a very interesting connection between the quaint readings 
of Lamb, the theories of Coleridge, and the natural artistic 
instincts of Wordsworth. Certainly the name Biirger seems 
to have been coupled with that of Percy in the minds of 
Wordsworth and Coleridge from the beginning. The 
Ancient Mariner, the first of the Lyrical Ballads, and the 
one which suggested the writing of the others, is 
obviously influenced by the cadence and the style of Taylor's 
translation, and w^as to be published in the Monthly Maga- 
zine where Leonora had appeared. The decision of Words- 
worth and Coleridge to study in Germany, the fact that one 
of the first things that Wordsworth did there was to buy 
a copy, not only of Percy's Reliques, but of Biirger's 
ballads,^ added to the fact that one of the authors espe- 
cially discussed by Wordsworth with Klopstock was 
Biirger^ — all suggest that the German poet may have been 
responsible for the interest of the young poets in his English 
original. This evidence is strengthened by Wordsworth's 
remarks in the Essay Supplementary to the Preface con- 
cerning Percy's collection, 'This work did not steal silently 
into the world, as is evident from the number of legendary 
tales that appeared not long after its publication, and had 
been modeled, as the authors persuaded themselves, after 
the old Ballad. The compilation was, however, ill suited 
to the then existing state of city society; and Dr. Johnson, 
*mid the little senate to which he gave laws, was not spar- 
ing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt. The 

^ Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Lucas (1802) 6. 38. 

^ Knight, Life of Wordsworth i. 170. 

^ See Wordsworth's account of the conversation with Klopstock, 
quoted by Coleridge in Satyrane's Letters. — Biographia Literaria, 
ed. Shawcross, 2. 177. 



124 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

critic triumphed, the legendary imitators were deservedly 
disregarded, and, as undeservedly, their ill-imitated models 
sank, in this country, into temporary neglect ; while Burger, 
and other able writers of Germany, were composing with 
the aid of inspiration thence derived, poems which were 
the delight of the German nation.' Then follows a com- 
parison between the style of Burger and that of Percy's 
collection. 

But whether Lamb, acting through Coleridge, gave the 
first impulse to Wordsworth's interest in the popular ballads 
or not, the influence upon the new ideals of his dehcate 
instinct and out-of-the-way readings must not be ignored. 
His interests at this time were much more exclusively 
literary than those of Coleridge, who could not help devi- 
ating into politics and philosophy. He was always ready 
to bring his adventurous friend down from the cloud- 
v/rapped heights of Neoplatonism to a practical question 
of style, and to point out, not the courses of the stars, but 
delightful little bypaths among old and forgotten books. 
Thus, while he did not provide a theory of style, he con- 
tinually furnished the materials and the standard for it. 
He would flit from poem to poem, choosing with almost 
unerring tact the 'genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of 
expression,' and avoiding by instinct the blooms of the 
hot-house. Being thus sensitive, he possessed a nature 
peculiarly 'capable of excitement without the application 
of gross and violent stimulants,' and loved what was simple 
and natural with the immediate response of a fine tempera- 
ment. Hence he scarcely needed to look beyond himself 
for the principles of criticism. What shocked or displeased 
him or left him cold was probably bad or false; what 
delighted him was probably good and genuine. In all his 
remarks there is this delicate egotism — this consciousness 
that he carries the touchstone within himself. The ideal 
of simplicity in accordance with which he criticised Coler- 
idge's early poems was a matter of taste, not the result of 



COLERIDGE AND HIS CIRCLE 1 25 

philosophical thought. Such an ideal could make no 
permanent appeal either to Coleridge or to Wordsworth; 
but it furnished a guide and a check to their bolder and 
more philosophical genius. The interest in the elder poets, 
especially, seems to have been Lamb's contribution to 
the cause. It was he who furnished Wordsworth with the 
library of old poems and plays which was, perhaps, the 
strongest and purest influence upon his work between 1800 
and 1807.^ To the simplicity of Coleridge and Southey, 
which was beginning to disturb the periodicals of the day, 
he added his own modest contributions, in the form of 
sonnets after the manner of Bowles. Some of these were 
appearing in the Monthly Magazine about the time Words- 
worth went to Bristol" to meet those 'two remarkable 
youths, Southey and Coleridge.' 

Thus it may be seen that, from the stimulating centre 
furnished by Coleridge's argumentative and contagious 
speech and manner, there were radiating lines of influence, 
in Southey, in Lamb, in the Monthly Magazine — not to 
mention minor disciples like Thelwell and Lloyd — which 
all tended to spread the ideal of a more simple and truly 
poetical expression. Poetry must no longer be distinguished 
from prose by external marks of language ; its beauty must 
be something higher — not dress and jewelry adorning it 
from without, but a spirit illuminating and transfiguring 
it from within. This spirit had as yet no name. Coleridge 
and Lamb called it passion, or imagination, or fancy, but 
without being quite sure of the term that most clearly 
expressed it. However, they both thought they could dis- 
tinguish it when they found it, and sought for it always 
in their enterprising reading. But when Coleridge met 
Wordsworth, he at once recognized in him the quality which 
he considered the nameless essential of poetry; and then 
and there began the second stage in this noble discussion. 

^Letters of Charles Lamb i. 160. 

^ The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 



CHAPTER 5. 

COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH. 

What Wordsworth brought to the discussion already so 
well begun we can only guess from the character that it 
immediately assumed. He seems to have interpreted the 
more abstract reasoning of Coleridge in the light of his 
old imaginative love of nature, and his more recent interest 
in the psychology and the sorrows of the poor and lowly. 

Of this 'still, sad music of humanity' there are many 
echoes in the verse written after he left Cambridge. Indeed 
there is already a hint of it in the Evening Walk and the 
Descriptive Sketches — a hint more fully developed in the 
two poems, The Female Vagrant and Salisbury Plain, 
which were later combined in Guilt and Sorrow. The Old 
Man Travelling^ and the narrative of the Ruined Cottage- 
have a similar motive. In the Borderers, composed as 
Vv^ordsworth tells us in 1 795-1 796, he had also explored 
the more strange and curious processes in the mind which 
lead to the sorrows that so troubled him; and had, for the 
first time, endeavored to make his syntax reflect the move- 
ments of impassioned thought. The best thing in the 
Borderers is the language ; it is a fine, clear, flexible imita- 
tion of actual speech, and, as such, anticipates the more 
special effort of the Lyrical Ballads. In this 'selection of 
the real language of men,' and, incidentally, of the language 
of Shakespeare, he seems to have attained, for the first 
time,^ a perfect command of the English idiom. The 

^ Printed as Animal Tranquillity and Decay in the Oxford edition, 
which follows the last edition printed in Wordsworth's lifetime. 

^ Incorporated in the first book of the Excursion. 

^The translation of Juvenal (reprinted in Letters of the Words- 
worth Family i. 94-98) is more idiomatic than anything Words- 
worth had written hitherto. No doubt this imitation of the 'real 
language of men/ as employed by the satirists, also helped him to 
attain a command of English phrase and syntax. 



COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH 1 27 

language of the poetic drama had always tended to bridge 
the gap between the formal written language and col- 
loquial speech. In Wordsworth's development it seems to 
have prepared the way for the experiment of 1798. 

Hence, when the frequent intercourse between the two 
poets began in 1797, Wordsworth was prepared to vitalize 
and illustrate the theories of Coleridge by his more intense 
and imaginative interest in the concrete facts of nature and 
human life. The two young men were alike in their natural 
bent toward philosophical criticism. Possessing at first a 
less unerring instinct for style than Lamb, they also pos- 
sessed active and powerful intellects, which continually 
brought their personal tastes to the bar of judgment, and 
sought to find a basis for their own preferences in the 
fundamental characteristics of human nature. Accord- 
ingly, Coleridge's tendency to philosophical speculation, 
sportively or seriously rebuked by Lamb when it took a 
religious turn, and blithely disregarded under other circum- 
stances, coincided with something in Wordsworth's own 
mind, and became the most vital element in their mutual 
discussion of the ideal of poetic expression towards which 
they had both been blindly groping. The scope of this 
new discussion is suggested in two incidental remarks by 
Coleridge and Wordsworth. Upon hearing Wordsworth 
recite his poem, Salisbury Plain, Coleridge was immediately 
impressed with Wordsworth's peculiar gift of making 'the 
familiar be as though it were not familiar,' of suggesting 
'the depth and height of the ideal world' through the most 
common incidents of daily life. This seemed to him the 
diviner spirit of poetry which he had been seeking — the 
inward transfiguring grace. 

'This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings 
is more or less predominant, and which constitutes the 
character of his mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to 
understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect 
(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their 



128 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

appropriate marks, functions, and effects, matured my con- 
jecture into full conviction) that fancy and imagination 
were two distinct and widely differing faculties,' writes 
Coleridge.^ This presupposes a whole theory of psychology 
as a basis for a theory of poetry — a theory which Words- 
worth developed and utilized in his classification of his 
poems in accordance with the human faculties, and their 
'appropriate marks, functions, and effects' therein illus- 
trated. But Wordsworth's own indications of the scope 
of the talk that inspired the Lyrical Ballads go even further. 
He presupposes a historical survey of social psychology, 
as well as a thorough investigation of the development of 
language and literature. 'For to treat of the subject with 
the clearness and coherence of which I believe it sus- 
ceptible,' he says, *it would be necessary to give a full 
account of the present state of public taste in this country, 
and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved ; 
which again could not be determined without pointing out 
in what manner language and the human mind act and react 
on each other, and without retracing the revolutions not 
of literature alone but likewise of society itself.'^ This 
ambitious outHne must always be borne in mind in criticiz- 
ing any single statement concerning the language of poetry 
made by Coleridge or Wordsworth. Their utterances were 
not casual or arbitrary. They were part of a great, and, in 
general, a self-consistent whole, which was never completed 
in detail, but which always formed the background for any 
individual remark. The separate fragments of Words- 
worth's literary criticism bear much the same relation to 
each other, and to an unwritten whole, as the shorter poems, 
the Prelude, and the Excursion bear to the projected 
Recluse. 

This unwritten inquiry certainly included: 

' B. L. I. 60. 

' Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. 



COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH 1 29 

1. An analysis of the poetic faculty in all its manifesta- 
tions, with some inquiry not only into the nature of the 
feeling induced by poetry, but into the character of all 
natural phenomena which accidentally, as it were, produce 
a spiritual reaction analogous to that which the poet aims 
to produce or to reproduce. 

2. The observation of the manner in which the poetic 
faculty expresses itself in unpremeditated speech — in those 
spontaneous associations of images, and deviations from the 
normal order and structure of language, for the sake of a 
special emphasis, which are called figures of speech. 

3. The determination of the kind of words and phrases 
that have been the most universal and permanent expression 
of this faculty in English. 

These three elements in the discussion are all suggested 
in the definition of the purpose of the Lyrical Ballads which 
Wordswortli gave in 1802 — *to choose incidents and situa- 
tions from common life, and to relate or describe them, 
throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language 
really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over 
them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary 
things should be presented to the mind in an unusual 
aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these inci- 
dents and situations interesting by tracing in them truely 
though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our 
nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which 
we associate ideas in a state of excitement.' This is far 
from being a narrow definition of poetic style. Whether 
we say with Dryden, or Dryden's master, Longinus, or 
with John Dennis, that the language of poetry is the lan- 
guage of passion ; or whether, with Aristotle, or Shelley, 
or Walter Pater, we emphasize the 'strangeness added to 
beauty' in the poet's style; or whether, with Horace, and 
the whole school of Latin-French criticism represented by 
Pope, we especially insist on the selective power of the 
poet, we can still find our definition included in that of 



130 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Wordsworth. But, while these three elements were all 
suggested in his criticism from the first, and implied in it 
to the last, there was a distinct shift of emphasis. The 
poetic development that began in 1798 with a defense of 
the language of the lower and middle classes of society ends 
with the preface on the language of imagination and fancy 
in 181 5; and it is the last which is allowed to stand as an 
introduction to the poet's complete works for the rest of his 
life. The language of the Lyrical Ballads will not be 
entirely understood until we follow it to its maturity in 
Laodamia and the Primrose of the Rock. 

This, unfortunately, we cannot do within the narrow 
limits of these pages. Nor can we trace the indebtedness 
of Wordsworth to the formal psychology and philosophy 
to which Coleridge introduced him — the theory of the asso- 
ciation of ideas and the physiological origin of them in 
Hartley's Observations on Man and Darwin's Zoonomia, 
and the discussions of Spinoza which so troubled the 
inquisitive spy. The effect of this new reading on Words- 
worth's diction alone was so extensive and remarkable that 
it demands an entirely separate treatment in connection 
with the Prelude, where the style so brilliantly exemplified 
in the Lines written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey is 
carried to its height.^ It is one of the miracles of poetry 
that lines which have taken such a hold on the popular 
imagination as these should be merely the result of setting 
to music the semi-technical vocabulary of treatises on 
physiology and psychology. But while it must not be for- 
gotten that Tintern Abbey, no less than the true Lyrical 
Ballads, is an offshoot of the new effort and criticism, 
and that the style there displayed was developing side by 
side with the style of The Thorn, nevertheless we must 
confine ourselves, for the present, to the theories illustrated 
in the latter. 

^ See Beatty, 'Wordsworth and Hartley' — The Nation 97. 51 ff. 



COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH 331 

However, since all three elements which we have dis- 
tinguished in the theory of Wordsworth and Coleridge at 
this time affected the imitation of the language of the 
middle and lower classes, it is necessary to consider the 
various hints of the part that each of them played in the con- 
versations of that time. They are all an effort to rein- 
terpret and vitalize the familiar ideas of the eighteenth 
century. The old search for a universal language of poetry 
was begun anew, with a deeper faith that poetry is passion — 
that in the actual psychology of emotion is to be found the 
source and the standard of every legitimate poetical device. 

I. The Poetic Faculty — Imagination and Fancy. 

The discussion of imagination began, says Coleridge, 
with his attempt to analyze the peculiar quality in Words- 
worth's poetic association of ideas, as compared with that 
of verse which might seem more clever and striking. 
The distinction which he and Wordsworth were elaborating 
and illustrating for the next twenty years is expressed by 
Wordsworth in his note to The Thorn in 1800: 'Super- 
stitious men are almost always men of slow faculties and 
deep feelings ; their minds are not loose, but adhesive ; they 
have a reasonable share of imagination, by which I mean 
the faculty which produces impressive effects out of simple 
elements ; but they are utterly destitute of fancy, the power 
by which pleasure and surprise are excited by sudden 
varieties of situation and by accumulated imagery.' 

As Wordsworth illustrates the distinction by observing 
the minds of his humble neighbors, so Coleridge illustrates 
it by observing the mind of Wordsworth^ : *A poet's heart 
and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and 
unified with the great appearance of nature, and not merely 
held in solution and loose mixture with them, in the shape 
of formal similes. ... It must occur to every reader 

^Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge i. 404-406. 



132 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

that the Greeks in their reHgious poems address always the 
Numina Loci, the Genii, the Dryads, the Naiads, etc., etc. 
All natural objects were dead, mere hollow statues, but 
there was a Godkin or Goddessling included in each. In 
the Hebrew poetry you find nothing of this poor stuff, as 
poor in genuine imagination as it is mean in intellect. At 
best it is but fancy, or the aggregating faculty of the mind, 
not imagination, or the modifying and coadunating faculty. 
This the Hebrew poets appear to me to have possessed 
beyond all others, and next to them the English. In the 
Hebrew poets each thing has a life of its own, and yet they 
are all our life.' 

These distinctions are undoubtedly Coleridge's; but the 
illustration of the effect of imagination could only have 
originated with Wordsworth. 'During the first year that 
Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours,' writes Coleridge,^ 
'our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal 
points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the 
reader by faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the 
power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying 
colors of the imagination. The sudden charm, which acci- 
dents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set, 
diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to 
represent the practicability of combining both.' This at 
once recalls the recognition of the transfiguring power of 
the light of sunset which had been Wordsworth's first 
poetic inspiration at fourteen, as well as the theme of much 
of his descriptive writing, and the subject of his only piece 
of literary criticism' 'hitherto. No doubt, as he spoke to 
Coleridge of these things, he remembered the curious expe- 
riences of his boyhood — how the lonely figure of the 
shepherd on the hilltop, ennobled by mist and light, had 
flashed upon his eye, a strange and godlike form ; how the 
unexpected sight of the black crag had stirred and troubled 

^ B. L. 2. 5. The italics are mine. 



COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH 1 33 

him for days with thoughts of huge and mighty forms that 
do not move like Hving men. He knew that the shepherd 
was but a poor, inglorious creature, and that the black crag 
was only a 'rocky protuberance,' as Dr. Johnson would 
say; but such experiences were like the waking of old 
memories, or the sudden vision of strange spiritual worlds 
beyond the veil of sense. These shadowy exaltations were 
moments of fear and joy and astonished self -revelation. 
If his poetry could produce on other minds the effect that 
the 'poetry of nature' produced on his — then the great 
problem of the source and end of imaginative art was 
solved. This new interpretation of the boyhood experience 
that first made him a poet is the theme of the Prelude, which 
was begun shortly after this time, and is throughout an 
illustration of the new conception of imagination. Much 
that he there writes down for Coleridge he must already 
have said in the autobiographical outpourings natural in the 
beginning of an enthusiastic friendship. 

The different phases of the new theory of imagination 
are illustrated in The Thorn. 'This,' Wordsworth said,^ 
'grew out of my observing on the ridge of Quantock Hill, 
on a stormy day, a thorn which I had often passed, in calm 
and bright weather, without noticing it. I said to myself, 
"Cannot I by some invention do as much to make this Thorn 
permanently an impressive object as the storm has made it 
to my eyes this moment ?" ' In attempting to do this he 
chose, as a medium of communication to the reader, the 
simple mind that he describes as imaginative rather than 
fanciful — a mind in which a single overwhelming emotion, 
uniting with all the dim sense of wonder characteristic of 
children and unlearned men, gives unity and intensity to its 
impressions, as the storm seems to unify and transfigure 
the outstanding features of a landscape. This single emo- 
tion expresses itself in a tendency to recur to the one absorb- 

^ See Memoirs i. no. 



134 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

ing idea, and to bring everything else into relation with it; 
hence the elaborate repetitions in the poem. 

To heighten the coloring of imagination, Wordsworth 
does not hesitate to make use of distinctly romantic sug- 
gestions — such as the stirring of the moss on the child's 
grave beneath the spade, and the haunting vision of the 
baby's face. Such associated ideas, borrowed from litera- 
ture very different from that which he essayed to write, 
are also used in The Idiot Boy and Peter Bell, where all the 
artistic effects of moonlight, well known to cheap romancers, 
and images of horseman ghosts and blooming wood-boys 
and 'spires and mosques and abbey windows' are made to 
attend on the lowly figures of the poor idiot boy and the 
disreputable potter. 

2. Figures of Speech. 

On the subject of imagination, Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge seemed to be in agreement from the first. With 
language it was not so. As early as 1802 Coleridge began 
to suspect that 'somewhere or other there is a radical dif- 
ference in our theoretical opinions concerning poetry.'^ 
This radical difference seems to consist in their respective 
use of the term language. To Coleridge language meant 
words considered in themselves, and especially in their 
syntactical relations^ ; to Wordsworth it meant the whole 
imaginative expression of the thought — which, in most 
cases, meant figures of speech. This he probably did not 
at first realize. Before 1802 his use of the terms language, 
phraseology, diction, etc., seems to be rather loose. No 
doubt he was continually influenced by Coleridge's more 
distinct interpretation of these words. 

But when, in the Appendix on Poetic Diction, he really 
undertakes to define his terms, several difficulties in the 

^ Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 2. 386-387. 
' B. L. 2. 39-49. 



COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH 135 

Preface of 1800 are at once cleared. Obviously he is not 
talking about vocabulary and syntax. Primarily he is talk- 
ing about figures of speech and rhetorical devices. When, 
in 1802, he condemns the lines, 

These valleys and rocks never heard, 
Ne'er sighed at the sound of a knell, 
Or smiled when the Sabbath appeared, 

as 'vicious poetic diction,' we see that he cannot mean the 
choice or arrangement of words. Valleys, rocks, sighed, 
sound, smiled. Sabbath, appeared — what words could be 
more homely or more specific ; what grammatical construc- 
tion or what order of words could be more straightforward 
or simple ? What he is actually condemning is the pathetic 
fallacy, the false and frigid personification of valleys and 
rocks as creatures that could sigh or smile. This he makes 
plain enough. The two lines, 'Ne'er sighed at the sound,' 
etc., he says, are an instance of the 'language of passion 
wrested from its proper use, . . . and applied upon an 
occasion which does not justify such violent expression.' 
It is therefore 'vicious poetic diction.' 

The meaning that Wordsworth here makes so explicit 
seems to be more or less implicit in what he says concern- 
ing language. 'Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer' 
is at least as sim.ple in vocabulary, and almost as direct in 
construction, as the line, 'A different object do these eyes 
require.' In both cases there is a slight departure from the 
normal order of prose. Yet Wordsworth condemns the first, 
and approves the second. What he apparently objects to 
is not the words as such, but the frigid periphrasis of 'busy 
race,' and the stale personification in 'morning smiles.' In 
other words, his criticism, from first to last, concerns not 
poetic diction, primarily, but poetic imagery. He is inter- 
ested in words in so far as words are also metaphors. 

When we make this mental transference, substituting 
imagery for language, we begin to understand the statement 



T36 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

that the peasant daily communes with the best objects 
from which the best part of language is usually derived, 
and that 'the language arising out of repeated experience 
and regular feelings is a more permanent and a far more 
philosophical language than that frequently substituted for 
it by poets/ As Hartley had taught him, the language of 
men is vitally metaphorical. We continually express one 
idea in terms of another, and explain images by other asso- 
ciated images. In the figurative expressions and illustra- 
tions that men daily use — especially when strong feeling 
puts a strain on the ordinary resources of language — are 
found the germs of poetic art. 

'Similes, fables, parables, allegories, etc.,' writes Hartley,^ 
'are all instances of natural analogies improved and set off 
by art. And they have this common to them all, that the 
properties, beauties, perfections, desires, or defects and 
aversions, which adhere by association to the simile, 
parable, or emblem of any kind, are insensibly, as it were, 
transferred upon the thing represented. Hence the passions 
are moved to good or evil, speculation is turned into prac- 
tice, and either some important truth felt and realized, or 
some error and vice gilded over and recommended.' We 
cannot speak of a 'rosy face,' or a 'friendly greeting,' or 
a 'cool manner' without speaking metaphorically ; and the 
most permanent and expressive metaphors are those which 
are founded upon the most universal phenomena — upon 
those which are connected with 'our moral sentiments and 
animal sensations, with the operations of the elements, and 
the appearance of the visible universe ; with storm and sun- 
shine, with the revolutions of the seasons, with cold and 
heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries and 
resentments, gratitude and hope, fear and sorrow.'^ 

When Wordsworth's term, language, is interpreted to 
mean metaphor, primarily — the expression of one experi- 

^ On Man i. 297. 

^ Preface to the Lyrical Ballads 1802. 



COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH 1 37 

ence in terms of another — we begin to understand wherein 
the language of the present has the advantage over that of 
the cheap poet. The poet talks about the 'flames' of love and 
the 'lightnings' of the fair lady's eyes ; but both the popular 
poet and his readers, according to Wordsworth in his early 
republicanism, are too busy with 'routs, dinners, morning 
calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, on 
foot or in carriage,'^ to give more than a passing glance to 
any actual flame or lightning. They take these phenomena 
on faith ; the images are handed down from poet to poet, 
growing a little more general and more faded with each 
transmission. But the peasant, even the peasant of little 
imagination, living in the presence of storms and lightnings, 
sitting without emotion, hope, or aim, in the loved presence 
of his cottage fire, receives into his heart a clear image of 
these things through long observation and association ; and 
hence, if he compares a feeling to a flame, he associates a 
distinct image with the idea of flame, and the metaphor is 
true and vital, f^t was this clearness and reality of imagery 
that Wordsworth was trying to bring back into poetryJ 
T do not know how to give my reader a more exact notion 
of the style in which it was my wish and intention to write,' 
he says,- 'than by informing him that I have at all times 
endeavored to look steadily at my subject.' 

Of course the poet's choice of words is vitally affected 
by the choice of metaphors, and by the rigorous exclusion 
of figures of speech which do not really represent the object 
described, or the nature of the feeling which, in moments of 
excitement, colors and even distorts the perception of the 
object. And when the poet is speaking in the character of 
an excited peasant, dramatic fitness also limits the vocabu- 
lary. The observation of the speech of simple men certainly 
affects the words, and especially the syntax, of the Lyrical 
Ballads, as we shall see. Nevertheless, so little has Words- 

^ Letter to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807 (L. W. F. i. 302). 
" Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. 



138 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

worth's famous theory to do with words in themselves that 
it may be questioned whether it fairly excludes the use of 
such a word as incommunicable in Margaret's lament/ so 
often cited as an example of the inconsistency of his theory 
with his practice: 

Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan, 
Maimed, mangled by inhuman men ; 
Or thou upon the desert thrown 
Inheritest the lion's den ; 
Or hast been summoned to the deep. 
Thou, thou and all thy mates to keep 
An incommunicable sleep. 

This is not Margaret's language, the critics point out with 
glee, 'incommunicable' not being in that simple woman's 
vocabulary. But if the association of ideas is true and 
vital — if the words are a real expression of the mother's 
wistful thought: 'They are asleep; but they cannot give 
their sleep to me or to any one' — then the jcuriosa felicitas 
of the adjective in this connection, its mournful sonority, 
its vague Shakespearean suggestions, have nothing to do 
with the matter. There is nothing implying vv^ide experience 
or intellectual culture in Margaret's thought; it is one of 
those strange intuitive associations of ideas that come to 
children and poets and the simplest hearts. It is truly her 
method of expression, although the poet's vocabulary sup- 
plies the word. 

While this extension of the word language undoubtedly 
explains much of Wordsworth's criticism and practice, it 
cannot be asserted that he always used the term in this 
sense. In the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, in particular, he was 
deliberately imitating the speech of the lower classes, with 
all its peculiarities of vocabulary and syntax, as we shall 
see. He never could define his terms to the satisfaction of 
his friends. Coleridge did not know what he meant by 

^ The Affliction of Margaret 50-56 (Oxford edition, p. 117). 



COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH 1 39 

language; nor Crabb Robinson what he understood by 
imagination. Perhaps it was this conscious difficulty in 
translating his own rather emotional and poetical thinking 
into the terms of the intellect that prevented him from writ- 
ing more criticism. But in his use of the term language he 
w^as undoubtedly influenced also by a very interesting theory 
of Coleridge's. 

J. The Universal Language of Poetry. 

This notion, which is mentioned in the Advertisement of 
1798^ as the opinion of the author of the Ancient Mariner, 
and is suggested in a footnote added in Coleridge's hand- 
writing to the Preface of 1800, was probably the result of 
the reading of the ballads. Observing, with the possible 
help of Wordsworth, that the most ancient of these poems 
more nearly resembled the actual colloquial speech of 1797 
than did the average verse of that year/Coleridge was led 
to the opinion that there is a permanent body of English 
words and idioms, denoting universal phenomena and expe- 
riences, which have remained comparatively unchanged 
since the time of Chaucer.- This is the universal language 
of poetry, for it represents the permanent and changeless 
elements in human life.^ If we free the rustic speech from 
a few merely local elements, and the popular ballads from 
a very few archaisms, there remains much the same resid- 
uum ; and the residuum proves, on examination, to be a 

^ 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was professedly written in 
imitation of the style, as well as the spirit of the elder poets, but 
with a few exceptions, the Author believes that the language adopted 
there has been equally inteMigible for three centuries.' — Advertise- 
ment to the Lyrical Ballads. 

" 'It is worth while to observe that the affecting parts of Chaucer 
are almost always expressed in language pure and universally intelli- 
gible to this day.' — A Description of the Wordsworth and Coleridge 
MSS. in the Possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman, p. 19. 

See also Hazlitt, My First Acquaintance with the Poets (Literary 
Remains 2. 392). 



14© WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

body of words common to Chaucer and to almost any 
Englishman of the year 1797. He who can use this con- 
crete, emotional, and idiomatic speech with all the power 
of which it is capable has found the true and lasting basis 
of poetic diction. 

This theory both Wordsworth and Coleridge tried to 
illustrate, but with one characteristic difference; for in 
the Ancient Mariner Coleridge contrives to retain a few 
romantic archaisms, and Wordsworth, in the Lyrical Bal- 
lads, keeps some special realistic features of the speech of 
the lower and middle classes of society. With The Ancient 
Mariner we are not here concerned. But Wordsworth's 
effort must be carefully analyzed. 



CHAPTER 6. 

THE LYRICAL BALLADS. 

Although Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction had a 
sounder basis in hterary tradition and in psychology than 
an ignorant world of letters was prepared to admit, his own 
application of it, in its first extreme form, was very limited 
in time and in extent. Only in the Advertisement to the 
Lyrical Ballads of 1798 does he say that he means to employ 
the 'language of conversation in the middle and lower 
classes of society' ; and only in this volume does he actually 
succeed. in doing so. But even here he makes use of this 
language simply as an 'experiment,' and clearly indicates 
that the experiment applies only to a part — though a major 
part — of the collection. 

The poems composing the minority, not included under 
Wordsworth's definition of his purpose, are easily deter- 
mined. Apart from the contributions of Coleridge, and 
apart from Tintern Abbey, which, as Wordsworth himself 
indicates, was composed in the loftier and more impassioned 
strain of the ode,^ they prove to be the poems written before 
1797 — the Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree, The Female 
Vagrant, the Lines written near Richmond, and the Con- 
vict — none of which show any trace of the ballad-literature. 
One other poem in the volume shows virtually nothing of 
this influence. This is the Old Man Travelling, which 
occupies a unique place in the first edition. It is the only 
representative of a type of delineation of rustic life in 
blank verse which developed side by side with the Lyrical 
Ballads, but which does not otherwise appear in print till 
the volumes of i8(X). The remaining poems in the first edi- 
tion form a homogeneous group, clearly reflecting the 

^ See note on Tintern Abbey in the Lyrical Ballads, 1802-1805, 
reprinted by Hutchinson in the Oxford edition, p. 901. 



142 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

literary influence suggested in the title, and the theory of 
poetic diction suggested in the Advertisement. They are 
the real experiment — the attempt to co-ordinate the artless 
art of the ballads with Wordsworth's own observation of 
the psychological processes underlying the speech of simple 
men; the rest are merely poems written in various moods 
and in various styles. 

This group of the true Lyrical Ballads falls into four 
main divisions: 

1. Philosophical and narrative poems in the metre, and, 
to a certain extent, the style of the ballads, but wholly 
differing from them in substance. 

(a) Philosophical and reflective poems, in which the 
narrative element is at a minimum : 

Lines written in Early Spring 

Lines written at a Small Distance from my House 

Expostulation and Reply 

The Tables Turned. 

(b) Narrative poems in the nature of simple anec- 
dotes designed to illustrate a philosophical truth that 
is far less simple : 

We are Seven 
Anecdote for Fathers 
Simon Lee. 

2. Narrative and lyrical poems, less recondite in thought, 
but written in a 'more impressive metre than is usual in 
the Ballads'^ : 

(a) Poems more narrative than lyrical: 
Goody Blake and Harry Gill 

The Idiot Boy 
(Peter Bell), 

(b) Poems in which the lyrical element tends to pre- 
^ Preface, 1800, p. xxxv. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 143 

dominate, or does wholly predominate (characterized 
by the use of the refrain) : 

The Thorn 

The Last of the Flock 

The Mad Mother 

The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman. 

The last group most obviously illustrate Wordsworth's sug- 
gested definition of a lyrical ballad, as a narrative poem in 
which the 'feeling therein developed gives importance to 
the action and situation, and not the action and situation 
to the feeling,'^ though this description applies to all the 
poems. 

In these several groups of poems, there are some distinct 
peculiarities of language w^hich are directly traceable to the 
combined influence of the Reliques and the speech of rustics, 
and which, for better or for worse, had a far-reaching 
influence upon Wordsworth's poetic diction. 

As we have already said, by language Wordsworth appar- 
ently meant, not vocabulary alone, but the whole body and 
dress of thought — all that appears to the eye and ear when 
(if we may say this without irreverence) the word becomes 
flesh, and takes its place among things that have a material, 
as well as a spiritual existence. But the unit of expression, 
for all practical purposes, is generally the individual term — 
words, in the usual sense; and hence any influence affect- 
ing language does first of all affect the vocabulary. 
Accordingly, we will begin with the vocabulary of these 
Lyrical Ballads, and proceed thence to the more important 
matters of syntax, and of narrative and lyrical technique. 

I. Vocabulary. 

At first glance, the vocabulary of the Lyrical Ballads 
does not seem to be notable. Apart from a number of 
colloquial expressions, it is a pure, clear vocabulary of con- 

^ Preface, 1800, p. xvii. 



144 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Crete words, neither more nor less simple than the language 
of the majority of poems in the Oxford Book of English 
Verse. But when we examine it in the light of the discus- 
sions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, even this fact becomes 
interesting. 

As has already been said, the two poets had some notion 
that there was a permanent body of English words — the 
names of common things and universal emotions — which 
had remained comparatively unaltered since the days of 
Chaucer. This was the generally intelligible language of 
poetry which the eighteenth century had always endeavored 
to discover — a language 'simple, sensuous, and passionate.' 
This contention is fully justified by the Lyrical Ballads. 
Although Wordsworth's avowed effort is to imitate the 
language that he daily hears on the lips of unlearned men, 
stanza after stanza of the most typical Wordsworthian 
verse in this volume contain only words that may be found 
in Skeat's glossary to Chaucer. This is true, for instance, 
of the description of the little cottage girl : 

I met a little cottage girl, 

She was eight years old, she said ; 

Her hair was thick with many a curl"^ 
That clustered round her head,^ 

and of 'the wonderful lines — quam nihil ad genium 
naucleri' which Hutchinson chooses as the supreme example 
of a case in which the 'lineaments of the poet peep out 
through his clumsy disguise'^ : 

At all times of the day or night 
This wretched woman thither goes, 
And she is known to every .star. 
And every wind that blows. ^ 

^Occurs in Chaucer's poetry as crul, crulle, meaning curly.' 

^ We are Seven 5-8. 

^Lyrical Ballads, ed. Hutchinson, p. 240. 

* The Thorn 67-70. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 1 45 

Even when the poet is writing more philosophically, he 
still seems to find the vocabulary of Chaucer not inadequate. 
In the stanza, 

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings ; 

Our meddling intellect 
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things ; 

— We murder to dissect/ 

only the word 'dissect'^ is entirely unknown to his master. 
Of course there are many cases in which this is not so. 
Rustic^ in the line, 'She had a rustic woodland air,' and 
intermitted^ in the line, 'And held such intermitted talk,' 
are not Chaucerian. The remarkable thing is that he should 
have come so near the vocabulary of the 'first finder of our 
fair language,' when he was writing in accordance with a 
theory in which the imitation of Chaucer was merely an 
incidental suggestion by Coleridge. It is certainly a proof 
of the essential soundness of this new conception of the 
universal language of poetry that, after so many centuries, 
some of the most characteristic expressions of an imagina- 
tion so individual as that of Wordsworth should be strictly 
in the vocabulary of Chaucer.^ 

While this attempt to find the really permanent element in 
the English language was undoubtedly the most valuable 

^ The Tables Turned 25-28. 

" The earliest occurrence of this word noted in the N. E. D. is in 
Topsell, Serpents 621 (1607). 

^ The earliest occurrence of this word noted in the A''. E, D. is 
in Palladadius On Husbandry i. 1027 (c. 1440). 

*The earliest occurrence of the word in this sense noted in the 
A^. E. D. is in Wyatt, Death of the Countess Pembroke 421-/^2 
(1542). 

* Of the words in the Concordance to the poems of Wordsworth, 
I estimate that about 60 per cent occur, in some form, in the poetry 
of Chaucer ; about 68 per cent, in the poetry of Milton ; about 80 
per cent in the poetry of Spenser; and 90 per cent in the poetry 
of Shakespeare. 



146 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

feature of the new theory, there is abundant evidence that 
Wordsworth himself was more especially interested in the 
artistic possibilities of exclusively colloquial turns of expres- 
sion. These occur chiefly in the poems in which there is a 
somewhat dramatic attempt to imitate the manners, as well 
as the emotions, of humble characters, s By far the largest 
proportion of them is found in Goody Blake and Harry 
Gill and The Idiot Boy, as well as in the later, unpublished 
poem of The Tinker, which belongs to the same type, and 
in the first edition of Peter Bell, which, though not printed 
until 1819, is a true lyrical ballad. Where the emotional and 
lyrical element begins to predominate, these colloquialisms 
tend to disappear, as in The Thorn and The Last of the 
Flock. This is a rather interesting fact — a possibly unin- 
tentional illustration of Wordsworth's own belief that the 
universal language is the language of the heart. One would 
naturally expect to find colloquialisms in a dramatic lyric, 
where the poet is speaking through the mouth of a humble 
character, rather than in a narrative, where he speaks in 
his own person. But the half-humorous observation of 
external manners lowers the style, while emotion raises and 
universalizes it. This is especially true in the case of The 
Mad Mother, whose pathetic song is not sullied by any of 
the curious importations from vulgar speech that are so 
frequent in The Idiot Boy. 

The colloquialisms are of two sorts. There are words 
which are chiefly confined to speech; and there are words 
which, though frequent in literature and capable of beauti- 
ful and noble uses, are employed in the Lyrical Ballads in a 
manner not common outside of conversation. The col- 
loquialisms of the first type have generally an onomatopoetic 
value. In the earlier descriptive poems, Wordsworth had 
already showed a special interest in words expressive of 
sound. To those which he there employed he has now 
added a choice collection of more homely creations of this 
kind: 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 147 

Said Peter to the groaning Ass, 
But I will bang your bones.^ 

With his visage grim and sooty, 
Bumming, bumming, bumming.^ 

Burr, burr, now Johnny's Hps they burr^ 

The owlets hoot, the owlets curr.^ 

In such cases, as will be noticed, he often increases the 
effect of the word by repetition : 

She lifts the knocker — rap, rap, rap^ 

Then his hammer he rouzes. 
Batter! batter! batter!^ 

His teeth they chatter, chatter si\\V 

In addition to the words thus definitely expressing sound, 
there is a large number of words more vaguely onomato- 
poetic in character, all of which have the same homely 
rhythm, dimly suggestive of Mother Goose — fiddle-faddle, 
hob-nob, hurly-burly, flurry, bowses, pother, etc. In such 
lines as 

Fond lovers, yet not quite hob nob^ ; 

It dried her body like a cinder, 

And almost turned her brain to tinder,* 

^ Peter Bell 199-200. Reprinted from the edition of 1819 in 
Lyrical Ballads, ed. Hutchinson, pp. 137 fif. 
^ The Tinker 37. 
^ The Idiot Boy 107. 

* Ibid. 114. 
' Ibid. 258. 

® The Tinker 12. 

'^ Goody Blake and Harry Gill 12. 

* The Idiot Boy 299-300. 

^ The Thorn 131-132. Altered in 1815 to : 

A fire was kindled in her breast, 
Which might not burn itself to rest. 



148 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

there is a touch of honest vulgarity which is characteristic 
of The Tinker throughout. Nothing in his pubHshed work 
so completely reveals the strain of rustic good nature in 
Wordsworth, unmodified by any higher touches of poetry, 
as this piece, with its cheerful rude metre and unpolished 
phrases^ : 

Who leads a happy life 

If it's not the merry Tinker? 

Not too old to have a wife ; 

Not too much a thinker. 



Right before the Farmer's door 
Down he sits; his brows he knits; 
Then his hammer he rouzes ; 

Batter! batter! batter! 
He begins to clatter; 
And while the work is going on 

Right good ale he bowzes.^ 

But this poem was withheld from print, and the style 
employed in it was seldom allowed to appear in Words- 
worth's poetry after the Lyrical Ballads. In Benjamin the 
Waggoner, his most successful attempt at humor, some- 
thing of a broadly, rudely playful sympathy with the foibles 
of a humble sinner is retained; but it is expressed in 
language so pure and limpid that it would not disgrace 
Chaucer's own well of English undefiled. Many of the 
colloquial words just listed were omitted in correction,^ and 
do not appear in the Concordance at all. Others were never 
used after the appearance of the Lyrical Ballads^ W^ords- 

^ Reprinted in A Description of the Wordsworth and Coleridge 
Manuscripts in the Possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman, pp. 67- 
68; cf. Knight, Life of Wordsworth i. 310. 

^ The Tinker 1-15. 

^ Bang, fiddle-faddle, tinder, etc., were omitted in revision, and 
never employed again. 

* Burr, curr, hob-nob, hurly-burly, flurry (in the phrase in a 
flurry), etc., are employed only in the Lyrical Ballads. Bowses, 
batter, bumming, etc., occur only in the unpublished poem, The 
Tinker. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 149 

worth eliminated the over-colloquial elements from his 
vocabulary, as carefully as he removed the pedantic or 
bookish expressions from the early descriptive poems. The 
former are as little characteristic of his mature style as 
the latter. 

Most of the colloquial words had some artistic justifica- 
tion in their onomatopoetic value; but this can hardly be 
said of many phrases of the same type — 'not a whit the 
better he/ 'I fear you're in a dreadful zvay/ *in a mighty 
fret,' 'in a mighty flurry/ 

Sad case, as you may think, 
For very cold to go to bed, 
And then for cold not sleep a wink, 

etc. Most of these also were rejected by Wordsworth's 
mature taste.^ Nothing could give a better idea of the 
almost uniform nobility of his style than to look up words 
like dreadful, fret, mighty, etc., in the Concordance, and to 
find the quotation from the Lyrical Ballads standing out in 
lonely contrast to such lines as 

Implores the dreadful untried sleep of death.' 
Dim dreadful faces through the gloom appear.' 
I love the brooks which down their channels fret.* 

And see the children sport upon the shore 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.^ 

And these perennial bowers and murmuring pines 
Be gracious as the music and the bloom 
And all the mighty ravishment of spring.® 

^ None of the expressions here mentioned occurs in Wordsworth's 
poetry outside of the Lyrical Ballads. 
' D. S. Quarto 643. 
^ Ibid. 650. 
* Immortality 196. 
'"Ibid. 1 70- 1 71. 
^ Lady! the songs of Spring were in the grove 12-14. 



150 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

This fullness of content, this imaginative dignity, are the 
really typical features of Wordsworth's style, whether he 
is borrowing his actual words from a peasant or from 
Shakespeare. This he himself realized more and more.^ 
However, at the beginning, his interest in the poor and 
lowly made him forget that he was using them as types, 
and their language as a universal expression of universal 
feelings, rather than as an external mark of a single class, 
and a single stage of culture. When he takes a line of 
genuine poetry — of pure and emotional English — directly 
from the lips of a peasant,^ as he sometimes does, we are 
grateful indeed for the gift; but where this essentially 
poetical character is lacking, the language of the country 
villager is not in itself preferable to that of the polite Lon- 
doner. The real value of the language of the Lyrical 
Ballads is not that it is the speech of 'the lower and middle 
classes of society,' but that it is imiversal language of the 
heart in permanent and imiversal English words. 

2. Syntax. 

When we turn from the study of words per se to their 
logical relation to each other in the sentence — i. e., the 
syntax, we find that the combined influence of the Reliques 
and of Wordsworth's new principles had a much more 
distinct, and possibly a deleterious, influence upon his poetic 

^ Cf. Memoirs i. 129. 

^Of Simon Lee Wordsworth says: 'The expression when the 
hounds were out, "I dearly love their voices" [Simon Lee 48] was 
word for word' from the lips of the old man who served as the 
model for the superannuate^ huntsman [Memoirs i. iii]. The 
beautiful lines in The Solitary Reaper, 

The music in my heart I bore 
Long after it was heard no more, 

are almost word for word from the journal of Wordsworth's 
Quaker friend, Thomas Wilkinson. See the passage from the 
journal, quoted in Harper's William Wordsworth 2. 66. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 15 1 

Style. He was indeed successful in discovering a vocabu- 
lary common to the speech of the peasant and that of the 
scholar — to elder poetry and modern conversation ; and this 
vocabulary he used with precision. Accordingly, there was 
comparatively little for him to reject in the words employed 
in the Lyrical Ballads; they formed a nucleus for a larger 
and richer and more expressive poetic diction. With syntax 
it was not so. In endeavoring to imitate the intellectual 
processes of the simple mind, he lost sight of the natural 
and logical relations of thought to thought, usually 
expressed by syntax, and the necessity of preserving these 
relations in any adequate expression. 

As Coleridge said^ : 'We do not adopt the language of a 
class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as 
that class would use, or at least understand; but likewise 
by following the order, in which the words of such men are 
wont to succeed each other. Now this order, in the inter- 
course of uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction 
of their superiors in knowledge and power, by the greater 
disjunction and separation in the component parts of that, 
whatever it may be, which they wish to communicate. 
There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that siir- 
view, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he 
is to convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this 
means so to subordinate and arrange the different parts 
according to their relative importance, as to convey it 
at once, and as an organized whole.' The uneducated man 
does not look forward, and see the end of his speech beyond 
the beginning. He goes on adding thought to thought 
as they come, and connecting subordinate and co-ordinate 
ideas indifferently by 'and,' or leaving them wholly dis- 
connected.^ His emphasis is the emphasis of feeling alone, 

^B. L. 2. 43-44. 

" There is a good specimen of rustic syntax in the letter from an 
old servant quoted in Southey's Lives of Uneducated Poets, p. 2, in 
the passage: The last of my humble attempts . . . subscribe 
myself.' 



152 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

and, as Wordsworth noticed, he expresses this emphasis 
simply by repeating the important idea again and again — 
not by any attempt to subordinate the less important things 
to it. The result is that his speech has exactly the qualities 
that Coleridge discovered in too much of Wordsworth's 
poetry — 'prolixity, repetition, and an eddying instead of a 
progression of thought.'^ Yet this emotional rather than 
intellectual syntax has its worth for the poet; and for one 
who had sought a greater flexibility in the imitation of 
classical Latin, the discovery of the possibilities of variety 
and expressiveness in his own native idiom was invaluable. 
The result of reproducing the syntax of the unlearned 
was not unlike the result of imitating their vocabulary. 
As the words that Wordsworth uses are the words of 
Chaucer, so his syntax is the syntax of a still earlier period. 
What Kellner says^ of the prose of Alfred exactly describes 
the construction of sentences in the Lyrical Ballads: 'Alfred 
changes his construction in consequence of every change 
going on in his mind, while in a modern author the flow 
of the ideas is checked by the ready pattern of the syn- 
tactical construction. . . . The syntax of older periods 
is natural, natf — that is, it follows much more closely the 
drift of the ideas, of mental images ; the diction, therefore, 
looks as if it were extemporised, as if written on the spur 
of the moment, while modern syntax, fettered by logic, 
is artificial, the result of literary tradition, and therefore, 
far from being a true mirror of what is going on in the 
mind.'^ To follow more closely 'the drift of ideas, of 
mental images,' to make his language a true mirror of what 
is going on in the mind, especially of the manner in which 
we associate ideas in a state of excitement — this was the 
object of Wordsworth in some of the much derided man- 
nerisms in the Lyrical Ballads. As he himself said, he 
always had 'a worthy purpose.' 

^B. L. 2. 109. 

^ Historical Outlines of English Syntax, p. 9. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 153 

The effect of emotion (or lack of thought) on syntax is 
manifest in various types of sentences in the Lyrical 
Ballads, from the struggHng attempt to relate subject to 
predicate to the imavailing effort to create structures at 
once complex and unified. Even the most simple sentence 
is an intellectual achievement. The fusing of the ideas of 
subject and predicate in one organic whole often presents 
an almost insuperable difficulty to the uncultivated or 
excited mind. This is illustrated in one of the most fre- 
quent mannerisms of uneducated speech, which is also a 
special feature of the style of the popular ballads. When 
it occurs in literature, it is often copied from them. 

The dynt yt was both sad and sar.^ 

The yerlle of Fyffe, withowghten stryffe 
He bowynd hym over Sulway.' 

Then forthe Syr Cauline he was ledde.^ 

And Scarlette he was flyinge afoote.* 

The mind, in its interest in the subject, tends to lose sight 
of the predicate, and to cling to the image suggested by the 
substantive. In order to proceed, it has to take a fresh 
start, so to speak, with the pronoun representing the sub- 
stantive, and so quickly pass to the verb. Examples of this 
syntactical peculiarity are very frequent in the Lyrical 
Ballads,^ where it appears for the first time in Wordsworth's 
poetry. 

The eye it cannot chuse but see.® 

But the least motion which they made, 
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.'^ 

^ Chevy Chase 85. 
^ The Battle of Otterbourne 5-6. 
^ Sir Cauline, Part II 17. 
* Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne 57. 

^ There are thirty-two examples of it in the thirteen Lyrical 
Ballads. 
"^ Expostulation and Reply 17. 
'Lines Written in Early Spring 15-16. 



154 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Your limbs they are alive.^ 

The pony he is mild and good.^ 

Shame on me, Sir! this lusty lamb, 
He makes my tears to flow.^ 

The owlet in the moonlight air, 

He shouts from nobody knows where.* 

The doctor he has made him wait" 

The babe I carry on my arm. 

He saves for me my precious soul.* 

Alas ! alas ! that look so wild, 
It never, never came from me.' 

The peculiar mannerism of style here illustrated was one 
that Wordsworth took few pains to correct in the later 
editions of these poems. The lines 'His ancles, they are 
swoln and thick/^ become: 

His body, dwindled and awry, 
Rests upon ankles swoln and thick. 

The owlet in the moonlight air 

He shouts from nobody knows where,® 



In the lines 



he is omitted ; and the line, 'And Susan she begins to f ear,'^" 
is changed to 'And Susan now begins to fear.' The line, 
'Her face it was enough for me,'^^ is altered by punctua- 

^ We Are Seven 34. 

^ The Idiot Boy 313. 

' The Last of the Flock 17-18. 

* The Idiot Boy 3-4. 

' Ihid. 175. 

"" The Mad Mother 47-48. 

' Ihid. 87-88. 

^ Simon Lee 35. 

® The Idiot Boy 4-5. 

''Ihid. 187. 

" The Thorn 200. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 1 55 

tion — 'Her face! it was enough for me.' But otherwise 
these lines remain as they first stood through all Words- 
worth's attempts to correct his poems. 

In Wordsworth's conversion of the line, 'Her face it 
was enough for me/ to 'Her face ! it was enough for me,' 
by simply changing the punctuation, another type of syntax 
closely related to the one just mentioned is illustrated. Here 
the substantive stands by itself, or is connected with the 
preceding statement, and the pronominal subject and its 
predicate follow as a kind of explanation of the emotion 
impHed in the single word and the mark of exclamation. 
Though this type is sometimes distinguished from the other 
only by punctuation, it represents a somewhat different psy- 
chological procesSo The intense concentration of the mind 
on the subject and all it suggests is more frankly repre- 
sented, and the break between this and what follows is 
complete. This type of syntax occurs much less frequently 
than the other in the Lyrical Ballads. The following are 
examples of it : 

All day she spun in her poor dwelling, 
And then her three hours work at night ! 
Alas ! 'twas hardly worth the telling.^ 

And then the wind ! in faith, it was 
A wind full ten times over.^ 

But when the pony moved his legs, 
Oh! then for the poor idiot boy! 
For joy he cannot hold the bridle." 

The difficulty in joining the two members of the sentence, 
resulting, in these cases, from the interest that the mind 
takes in the subject to the exclusion of the predicate, may 
also be caused by a special interest in the predicate. In this 
case, also, there is an attempt to strengtlien the relation 

^ Goody Blake and Harry Gill 2^-2y. 
"■ The Thorn 190- 191. 
' The Idiot Boy 82-84. 



156 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

between the two by reduplicating the subject. These two 
types of reduplication are thus illustrated and described by 
Kellner : 

Your husband he is gone to save far off, 
Whilst others come to make him lose at home. 

— Shakespeare. 
She early left her sleepless bed, 
The fairest maid of Teviotdale. 

— Scott. 

'These instances illustrate two different psychological pro- 
cesses, and accordingly two different constructions. In the 
first case, the subject is foremost in the consciousness of 
the speaker, and the other idea connected with it, viz., the 
predicate, is dimmed for a moment, so that it takes the 
speaker some time to catch hold of it again. In the second 
case, the speaker is so much under the impression of what 
he is going to predicate, that he forgets for a moment to 
tell the person addressed what he is predicating about, and 
it takes some time until he finds out his mistake. In both 
cases there is a distinct pause between the two expressions 
for the same subject; in both cases the hearer has the 
impression that there is some emotion at work in the mind 
of the speaker. Both these circumstances make the expres- 
sion a favorite figure of speech.'^ 

This second type of reduplication is also not uncommon in 
the Lyrical Ballads^ : 

^ Historical Outlines of English Syntax, p. 40. 

^ Cf. the parody of Peter Bell by John Hamilton Reynolds which 
appeared in 1819, just before Wordsworth's own poem of that name. 
(It is one of the few parodies of Wordsworth which really repro- 
duce the poet's mannerisms of syntax. The oft quoted parody by 
Horace Smith in Rejected Addresses, for instance, has not caught 
the poet's style at all.) 

Now I arise, and away we go, 
My little hobby-horse and me. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 157 

Not higher than a two years' child, 
It stands erect, this aged thorn.^ 

Oh me! ten thousand times I'd rather 
That he had died, that cruel father!'' 

Alas! 'tis very little, all 

Which they can do between them.^ 

A reduplication whose psychological cause is very similar 
occurs when the interest in the predicate temporarily 
obscures the object: 

Alas ! I should have had him still. 
My Johnny, till my dying day.^ 

Sometimes, however, the reduplication is really due to a 
quick mental conversion of the subject into the object. 

Thy lips, I feel them, baby.° 

And this poor thorn they clasp it round.^ 

But these are only simple examples of constructions that 
occur in more complicated forms — forms which often come 
very near the line where the broken emotional syntax passes 
over into a more sustained intellectual structure. The sug- 
gestion of sustained thought immediately converts an 
apparent reduplication into a familiar literary device : 

Fond lovers, yet not quite hob rob, 
They lengthen out the tremulous sob.^ 

^ The Thorn 5-6. 

- Ihid. 142-143. 

^ Simon Lee 55-56. 

* The Idiot Boy 245-246. Cf. Reynolds' Peter Bell: 

And gathered leeches are to him, 

To Peter Bell, like gathered flowers. 
^ The Mad Mother ZZ- 
" The Thorn 17. 
' The Idiot Boy 299-300. 



158 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Even he, of cattle the most mild, 
The pony had his share.^ 

Him whom she loves, her Idiot Boy.^ 

In these cases the pronoun seems to be used, not in a some- 
what helpless and impulsive effort to keep hold of the sub- 
ject, but with deliberate forethought. In the first quotation, 
'fond lovers' is in intentional apposition with 'they'; in 
the two others, the pronoun seems to be used to point for- 
ward to the substantive, which is purposely withheld for a 
moment, instead of being parenthetically inserted on second 
thought. Such nice gradations suggest the more intellectual 
uses to which Wordsworth's practice in imitating the 
untaught cadence of extemporaneous speech could be put. 
In the end it gave him a fine and flexible instrument. 

But if the mind in which feeling triumphs over thought 
has some difficulty in fusing the primary elements of a 
sentence into an organic whole, it waxes increasingly help- 
less as it attempts to relate the larger units thus formed. 
Often there is no such attempt. The simple units are merely 
placed side by side, as in a child's first reader: T have a 
cat. My cat is white. My cat eats rats.' This is a favorite 
method in the Lyrical Ballads: 

Her eyes are wild, her head is bare, 
The sun had burnt her coal-black hair; 
Her eyebrows have a rusty stain, 
And she came far from over the main. 
She has a baby on her arm.^ 

I met a little cottage girl. 

She was eight years old, she said.* 

I have a boy of five years old. 
His face is fair and fresh to see; 

^ The Idiot Boy 250-251. 
Uhid. 16. 

' The Mad Mother 1-5. 
* We Are Seven 5-6. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 1 59 

His limbs are cast in beauty's mould, 
And dearly he loves me/ 

When the conjunctive and is used, it is inserted rather 
casually, as in ordinary speech, and does not connect the 
ideas in the series that are most closely related to each other. 
Where every statement has exactly the same structure, 
there is, of course, no emphasis, no indication of proportion 
and relation. But this is generally expressed by the con- 
tinual repetition, with changes and augmentations, of the 
fact uppermost in the mind of the speaker. Apart from 
the first group of philosophical poems, most of the Lyrical 
Ballads are wonderful complexes of such repetitions; the 
thoughts, seem to be woven together, appearing and dis- 
appearing like the different colored threads in a carpet. 
Of this type of structure. The Thorn is the best example. 
In the first stanza, for instance, note how the two principal 
features of the thorn — its age and its erectness — are inter- 
twined with a continually increasing number of illustrative 
details. 

There is a thorn; it looks so old, 

In truth you'd find it hard to say. 

How it could ever have been young, 

It looks so old and grey. 

Not higher than a two years' child. 

It stands erect this aged thorn; 

No leaves it has, no thorny points ; 

It is a mass of knotted joints, 

A wretched thing forlorn. 

It stands erect, and like a stone 

With lichens it is overgrown." 

^ Anecdote for Fathers 1-4. Cf. the use of an independent clause 
where we should expect a relative clause in the ballads, for example, 
Edom O'Gordon 85-86: 

Then bespake his dochter dear. 
She was baith jimp and sma. 

^ The Thorn i-ii. 



i6o Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

A closer relation between the independent assertions is 
attempted in the parenthetical structure so frequent in con- 
versation. Instead of employing subordinate clauses and 
modifying phrases, the details are inserted into the midst of 
other statements, just as they occur to the mind, each in 
the form of a complete little sentence: 

His head he raised — there was in sight, 
It caught his eye, he saw it plain — 
Upon the house-top, glittering bright, 
A broad and gilded vane/ 

Tis now some two and twenty years, 
Since she (her name is Martha Ray) 
Gave with a maiden's true good-will 
Her company to Stephen Hill.^ 

Sometimes, when a complex sentence is almost achieved, 
the subordinate clause has a tendency to detach itself and 
become independent, as in the following case : 

There's not a mother, no not one. 

But when she hears what you have done, 

Oh ! Betty she'll be in a fright.^ 

In this sentence the logical relation of the separate parts 
might be expressed thus : 'There is not a mother who will 
not be in a fright when she hears what you have done/ 
But in his excitement, the speaker loses track of the rela- 
tion of the last clause to the first, and lets it emerge into 
greater independence. The disposition to make each idea a 
separate assertion is also visible in the line. 

In Johnny's left-hand you may see 

The green bough's motionless and dead,* 

^Anecdote for Fathers 49-52. 

^The Thorn 115-118, Cf. Chevy Chase 89-90: 

'Then bespake a squyar off Northombarlonde, 

Ric. Wytharynton was his nam,' etc. 
^ The Idiot Boy 24-26. 
'Ibid. 88-89. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS l6l 

as compared with the more intellectual and literary con- 
struction to which Wordsworth altered it: 

In Johnny's left-hand you may see 
The green bough motionless and dead. 

Sometimes, too, there is a connecting word used loosely 
to refer to an idea in the mind of the speaker not expUcitly 
expressed : 

She talked and sung the woods among, 

And it was in the English tongue/ 

Often relation is merely suggested rather than clearly 
indicated : 

Proud of herself, and proud of him, 

She sees him in his travelling trim ; 

How quietly her Johnny goes." 

Even when a complex sentence is actually constructed, 
it is somAimes necessary to bind the parts together by a 
reduplication not unlike that employed in the joining of 
subject and predicate. As in the one case a pronoun was 
used to refer to the substantive, so in this an adverb, point- 
ing back to the subordinate conjunction, is inserted in the 
principal clause: 

But when the ice our streams did fetter. 
Oh then how her old bones would shake.^ 

Now, though he knows poor Johnny well. 
Yet for his life he cannot tell 
What he has got upon his back.* 

But to list ail the peculiarities of impulsive speech to be 
found in the Lyrical Ballads is impossible. We might speak 
of the flexible order of words — of inversions, not arbitrary 

^ The Mad Mother 9-10. 

^ The Idiot Boy 99-101. 

^ Goody Blake and Harry Gill 41-42, 

* The Idiot Boy 124-126. 



i62 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

and unidiomatic, as in the descriptive poems, but natural 
and expressive; of the trick of repeating adjectives or 
adverbs^; or of repeating the noun with some added 
modifier^; of the use of a noun for an adjective ('His face 
was gloom; his heart was sorrow'),^ etc.; but this would 
swell our study to unwieldy dimensions. Just because 
Wordsworth is trying to write as men talk — to register in 
the syntax all the shifting ideas and currents of emotion — 
it is very difficult to classify his constructions. They con- 
form to no system. Each sentence is a living organism, as 
wayward and individual as other organisms in their 
undisciplined natural state. 

In many cases the reader may wax impatient, and say 
with Coleridge*: It is indeed very possible to adopt in a 
poem the immeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and 
other blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused 
understanding interposes at short intervals, in order to keep 
hold of his subject, which is still slipping fronf him, and 
to give him time for recollection; or, in mere aid of 
vacancy, as in the scanty companies of a country stage the 
same player pops backwards and forwards, in order to pre- 
vent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of 
Macbeth, or Henry VHI. But what assistance to the poet, 
or ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to 
conjecture.' 

But this is one of the instances in which Coleridge's 
criticism is decidedly peevish. Whatever might have been 
the absolute value of these tricks of speech, as a prehminary 
inquiry into the sources of literary style, an experiment 

^ Goody Blake and Harry Gill loi ; Anecdote for Fathers 12 57; 
The Thorn 5. 4; The Idiot Boy 96; etc. Such repetition is charac- 
teristic of the ballads; cf. Sir Aldingar 147: 'Then woeful, woe- 
ful was her hart.' 

-The Mad Mother .27-28; The Idiot Boy 28-29; The Complaint 
of the Forsaken Indian Woman 36, etc. 

^ Cf . The Idiot Boy 254: 'Tis silence all on every side.' 

'B.L. 2. 43- 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 163 

in basing literary form upon the actual psychology of 
speech, they were far from worthless. The thoroughness 
and honesty of the experiment were sufficient to make it 
of value, merely as a scientific study ; the fact that some of 
the Lyrical Ballads were never superseded in popular 
affection by the poet's greater and more elaborate efforts 
shows that it was also an artistic achievement — that the 
language was not the language of a class alone, but of the 
general heart of man. 



J. Narrative and Lyrical Technique. 

In attempting to make the language of the lower and 
middle classes the medium of poetry, Wordsworth rejected 
the devices usually employed in the eighteenth century to 
raise poetry above prose. Personification and periphrasis ' 
do not occur in the Lyrical Ballads. But, for the outworn * 
arts of heroic poetry, he substituted the no less obvious arts 
of the popular ballad, interpreting and modifying them in 
the light of his own observations of rustic psychology^ The 
two devices most frequently em.ployed are the personal (*' 
appeal to the reader — sometimes by the use of the second 
person, more often by an assertion of the writer's veracity, 
or a statement of the source of his information — and the.^i.^ 
use of repetition, sometimes in the form of a refrain. 

In employing the first device, Wordsworth went far 
beyond his models, and thereby developed one of the most 
clumsy and ineffective mannerisms of his style — a man- 
nerism v/hich clung to him long after his experiments in 
rustic syntax had developed into a flexible and elaborate 
medium of thought, as well as feehng. The exchange of 
the impersonal tone of his poems hitherto for these gar-i 
rulous intrusions of the speaker into the course of the? 
story was a disadvantage rather than an advantage. How- \ 
ever, these numerous tags are not unsuitable in the highly 
colloquial language of the ballads: 



164 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Two poor old dames, as I have known} 

There's no one knows, as / have said} 

His hunting feats have him bereft 
Of his right eye, as you may see} 

Yet never had she, well or sick. 
As every man who knew her says, 
A pile beforehand, wood or stick.* 

These and the like are obviously paralleled, not only in the 
habits of rustic story-tellers, but by the narrative devices 
of the ballads : 

The sworde was scharpe and sore can byte, 
I tell you in sertayne} 

I wis, if you the trouthe would know. 
There was many a weeping eye.'' 

But it is in the use of the ballad-repetition that Words- 
worth sometimes fails most signally, but more often achieves 
his most original artistic success. This device of style is elo- 
quently defended in a note to The Thorn in the volume of 
1800' : 'There is a numerous class of readers who imagine 
that the same words cannot be repeated without tautology; 
This is a great error: virtual tautology is much oftener 
produced by different words when the meaning is exactly 
the same. Words, a Poet's words more particularly, ought 
to be weighed in the balance of feeling, and not measured 
by the space which they occupy upon paper. For the Reader 
cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion: it is 
the history or science of feelings. Now every man must 

^ Goody Blake and Harry Gill 34. 
' The Thorn 162. 
^ Simon Lee 26. 

* Goody Blake and Harry Gill 53-55. 
^^ The Battle of Otterbourne 109-110. 

* The Rising in the North 51-52. 
'Reprinted in the Oxford edition, pp. 899-900. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 1 65 

know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate impas- 
sioned feelings without something of an accompanying 
consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, 
or the deficiencies of language. During such efforts there 
will be a craving in the mind, and as long as it is unsatisfied 
the Speaker will cling to the same words, or words of the 
same character. There are also various other reasons why 
repetition and apparent tautology are frequently beauties of 
the highest kind. Among the chief of these reasons is the 
interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as 
symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, 
which are of themselves part of the passion. And further, 
from a. spirit of fondness, exultation, and gratitude, the 
mind luxuriates in the repetition of words which appear 
successfully to communicate its feelings.' 

The strength and the weakness of this position are both 
illustrated in the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth did not 
accurately distinguish between the cases where language 
is really inadequate to express feeling — where a normal 
human mind is helpless under an abnormal emotion — and 
the cases in which the inadequacy is due only to the very 
elementary powers of sustained thought or expression in 
the persons whose psychological processes he chose to 
imitate. In this instance, he forgot to apply the principle 
that he himself found so fruitful — the principle that all 
figures of speech must be justified by passion. In such 
poems as The Last of the Flock, The Mad Mother, and The 
Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman, there is the 
justifying passion; and the recurring refrains are felt to 
be as artistically effective as they are true to the feeling 
to be expressed. But too often the outward form exists 
without a sufficient emotional or artistic reason for it, as 
will be seen. But even where the repetition does not have 
its source in emotion, it is a legitimate mode of emphasis, 
provided that it supplements, instead of supplanting, the 
emphasis that a proper selection and subordination of 



1 66 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

details can give. Such an emphasis really exists in the 
Reliques. The theme of the story is generally so momen- 
tous, so melodramatic (being usually the danger of violent 
death to some person or group of persons), and the out- 
standing circumstances so important, that the poet must 
necessarily omit minor details. In the naive and rapid 
narrative, the repetition gives a reality to details that the 
hurried feelings of the reader would neglect, or serves to 
emphasize some really important situation. But in the 
majority of Wordsworth's ballads the swiftness of move- 
ment is lacking, and the slow and thoughtful reading that 
he demands often makes the repetition unnecessary as a 
matter of narrative technique. An analysis of the various 
uses to which Wordsworth has put the ballad-repetition 
will make this clearer. 

In the group of the philosophical poems, this device is 
almost the only feature that Wordsworth's thoughtful verse 
has in common with his naive models. The original pattern 
of such stanzas as the following is obvious : 

Why, William, on that old grey stone, 
Thus for the length of half a day, 
Why, William, sit you thus alone, 
And dream your time away?^ 

Up ! up ! my friend and clear your looks, 
Why all this toil and trouble? 
Up ! up ! my friend, and quit your books, 
Or surely you'll grow double." 

These at once recall the familiar structure of the ballads : 

Here take her, Child of Elle, he sayd, 

And gave her lillye white hand ; 
Here take my dear and only child, 

And with her half my land.^ 

^ Expostulation and Reply 1-4. 
^ The Tables Turned 1-4. 
^ The Child of Elle 189-192. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 1 67 

In the philosophical poems the repetition of a stanza with 
slight variation, so familiar in the ballads, is skilfully 
employed to round out the thought, and point the moral. 
In Expostulation and Reply the poem ends with a reference 
to the words with which it began : 

Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, 

Conversing as I may, 
I sit upon this old grey stone, 

And dream my time away. 

In the Tables Turned the thought rather than the words 
is repeated : 

Enough of science and of art; 

Close up those barren leaves ; 
Come forth and bring with you a heart 

That watches and receives. 

In the other philosophical poems there is a similar repeti- 
tion : 

Edward will come with you, and pray 

Put on with speed your woodland dress. 
And bring no book, for this one day 
We'll give to idleness,^ 

is echoed in the lines, 

Then come, my sister! come, I pray, 
V/ith speed put on your woodland dress. 

And bring no book ; for this one day 
We'll give to idleness.* 

The words, 

To her fair works did nature link 
The human soul that through me ran; 

And much it griev'd my heart to think 
What man has made of man,^ 

^ To my Sister 13-16. 

"" Ibid. 37-40- 

^ Lines Written in Early Spring 5-8. 



i68 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 
are recalled in the stanza, 

If I these thoughts may not prevent, 

If such be of my creed the plan, 
Have I not reason to lament 

What man has made of man?^ 

Here it will be seen that the closing of the poem with a 
recurrence to the thought with which it began, or which 
forms the centre of it, is an effective means of securing 
unity, and of emphasizing the theme. 

In the narrative poems the repetition is more frequent, 
and possibly less justifiable. In We are Seven the repeti- 
tion of the words which form the title, with various modifi- 
cations — 'Seven in all,' 'Seven are we,' 'Yet you are seven,' 
'Seven boys and girls are we,' 'O Master, we are seven,' 
'Nay, we are seven' — is the repetition of the one essential 
thought in the poem, and represents the obstinate clinging 
of the child's mind to one idea; and hence it is effective. 
In Goody Blake and Harry Gill there is a similar effort to 
emphasize the theme, or rather the climax of the story by 
repetition : 

That evermore his teeth they chatter, 
Chatter, chatter, chatter, still. 

In The Anecdote for Fathers this is hardly the case. Here, 
where the poet is speaking in his own person, and is not 
reiterating an important idea, the repetitious character of 
the narrative portion simply shows a difficulty in getting 
on — an unnecessary eddying of thought about something 
that should not hold it so long : 

'My little boy, which like you more,' 
I said, and took him by the arm — 
'Our home by Kilve's delightful shore, 
Or here at Liswyn farm?' 

^ Lines Written in Early Spring 21-24. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 169 

'And tell me, had you rather be,' 

I said, and held him by the arm, 

'At Kilve's smooth shore by the green sea, 

Or here at Liswyn farm?'^ 

Here it is obvious that the second stanza really adds nothing 
to the first — as Wordsworth recognized after Coleridge had 
used this passage as an example of the tendency to eddy 
rather than to progress. In later editions he omitted the 
first stanza, to the great improvement of the poem. 

But it is in the lyrical poems, where the repetition becomes 
a refrain, that Wordsworth's attempt to make literary 
artifice an accurate reflection of psychological processes is 
most successful. Like other poetical devices, the refrain 
has its origin in a characteristic of impassioned feeling. 
The mind under the influence of a great emotion is intensely 
preoccupied with a single idea, or group of associated ideas. 
Around these all other ideas tend to circle; in this every 
train of thought begins and ends. When a new and alien 
series of images is suggested, the mind follows it but a 
little way, and then finds some means of linking it with 
the single overwhelming feeling. Generally, as Words- 
worth noticed, the idea is repeated again and again in the 
same or very similar words. But in many songs there is 
no effort w^hatever to trace the process by which the mind 
returns to the refrain. It is merely added every time at 
the end of a stanza or set number of verses, whether it has 
any real connection with them or not. 

To make a natural, rather than an artificial, use of this 
device is the aim of Wordsworth in all the poems we have 
grouped as lyrics. Of these, The Thorn seems the least 
effective. This is partly due to the intrusion of the shadowy 
speaker, who is neither an old skipper nor the poet himself, 
but something between, and who, moreover, is not telling 
his own story. The lyrical element is thus partly dissipated 

^Anecdote for Fathers 29-36. 



lyo WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

before it pierces through the somewhat alien medium to 
the imagination of the reader. Nevertheless, in introducing 
the refrain, 

Oh misery ! Oh misery ! 

Oh woe to me ! O misery ! 

Wordsworth has represented it as a natural result of the 
tendency of the adhesive mind of the old seaman to 
cling to the idea that has impressed him, and to repeat it 
in the same words — as well as an expression of the feeling 
of the poor woman. 

In The Last of the Flock there is a double refrain which 
is much more skilfully used. The speaker naturally begins 
with the explanation, 

Shame on me, Sir ! this lusty lamb, 

He makes my tears to flow. 
To-day I fetched him from the rock ; 

He is the last of all my flock, 

which suggests the history of the flock. When he comes to 
the account of his fifty comely sheep, the contrast between 
the memory of these and the one last lamb in his arms 
suddenly forces itself upon him, and he recurs to his first 
thought, but expresses the thought in different words : 



adding. 



This lusty lamb of all my store 
Is all that is alive: 

And now I care not if we die 
And perish all of poverty. 



This last reflection immediately suggests the rest of his 
story, and he begins again. He had to sell his flock one by 
one to buy his little children bread, he says. As he speaks, 
the woefulness of this takes possession of his mind; and, 
accordingly, every added group of details naturally ends in 
the reflection, 'For me it was a woeful day,' which becomes 
the refrain: 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 171 

To see it melt like snow away, 
For me it was a woeful day. 

They dwindled one by one away ; 
For me it was a woeful day. 

And from the elaboration of this thought of the dwindling, 
the mind is brought back to the original refrain, and the 
poem ends in the thought with which it began : 

They dwindled, Sir, sad sight to see! 

From ten to five, from five to three, 

A lamb, a weather, and a ewe; 

And then at last, from three to two; 

And of my fifty, yesterday 

I had but only one, 

And here it lies upon my arm, 

Alas ! and I have none ; 

To-day I fetched it from the rock; 

It is the last of all my flock. 

In the Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman, there 
is a very lovely use of a double refrain. Each refrain seems 
to suggest the other, and, as in The Last of the Flock, both 
are imited at the end ; and the efifect is still further increased 
by an echoing of the rhymes of the refrain through the rest 
of the poem : 

Before I see another day. 
Oh let my body die away ! 

Then here contented will I lie ; 
Alone I could not fear to die; 

both of which are again suggested in the words : 

For strong and without pain I lay, 
My friends, when ye were gone away. 

Too soon, my friends, ye went away. 
For I had many things to say. 

All stiff with ice the ashes lie ; 
And they are dead, and I will die. 



172 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

For-ever left alone am I, 

Then wherefore should I fear to die? 

In the last lines the two refrains unite : 

My poor forsaken child ! if I 

For once could have thee close to me, 

With happy heart I then should die, 

And my last thoughts would happy be. 

I feel my body die away, 

I shall not see another day. 

Here certainly the eddying of thought is used with v/on- 
derful artistic effect, as subtle as it is beautiful and pathetic. 

In The Mad Mother the repetition is still more delicate. 
It is used chiefly in a remarkable complex of rhymes, which 
repeat and echo each other. The result is a curious haunt- 
ing cadence. Every rhyme falls on the ear like a refrain, 
though few are aware in what this refrain-like quality 
consists. 

To trace further Wordsworth's use of the real language 
of men, and the psychological processes behind it, is per- 
haps unnecessary. A large book could be written on his 
use of repetition alone; but the discussion of each single 
example of every different usage would be more laborious 
than edifying. From the examples already cited it is evi- 
dent that the language of the Lyrical Ballads is as much 
the result of conscious art as the language of Paradise Lost. 
It was a deliberate and thorough application of a theory 
which seemed strange enough to 'indolent reviewers,' but 
which has much in common with the theory at the basis of 
the more scientific study of language for the last century.^ 

^ Cf. Kellner, Historical Outlines of English Syntax, p. 10. Tn 
the study of English syntax, the vulgar talk cannot be overlooked, 
nay — but for the difficulty of getting trustworthy materials — we 
ought, in discussing the evolution of syntax, to start from the rustic 
talk, just as a botanist, in dealing with the evolution of the straw- 
berry, will not take the artificial fruit, but the wild strawberry of 
the wood as the starting-point of his study.' 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 173 

Of course, in his experiment, Wordsworth made some 
artistic mistakes, and fell into several bad habits. A man of 
twenty-eight, 'not much used to composition,' is not likely 
to produce poetry uniformly excellent in workmanship. He 
is the less likely to do so when he has the misfortune to be 
born in a bad age, and must rediscover poetic principles and 
models for himself. 

Among the evil results of the experiment was the 
unnecessary use of the various tags — 'why should I fear to 
say?' etc. — which occasionally fill half a line with nothing 
at all ; and the loss of that energetic forward movement so 
characteristic of his descriptive poems. The eddying repe- 
titious narrative of the untrained speaker has its emotional 
uses ; but it is not an ideal standard. The effect of a poem 
should result, as far as possible, from its inner structure. 
Where there is a continual necessity for external bolsters — 
repetitions and appeals to the reader — art in its highest sense 
does not exist. There is not a skilful adaptation of means to 
the attainment of a desired end. 

Of this high impersonal art, where the means are con- 
cealed Hke the bony structure of a living organism, instead 
of shamelessly flaunted, Wordsworth was to give many 
examples. Indeed there are some examples of it in the 
Lyrical Ballads — in The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian 
Woman and The Mad Mother, for instance; generally the 
art in this collection of poems is not so obvious as it seems. 
But over against the triumphs we may place such a failure 
in structure as the original Simon Lee, on which Words- 
w^orth's own alterations were the best possible criticism. 

In Simon Lee the poet is speaking in his own character, 
not that of a peasant or the garrulous old skipper in The 
Thorn; but he is nearly as helpless to mass details, and 
entirely to finish one thought before he proceeds to the next. 
The following is the order in which the details of Simon's 
appearance were first given: — ancient hunting feats — one 
eye left — a cheek like a cherry — loss of his master and 



174 WORDSWORTH S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION 

friends — one eye left — disabled limbs — loss of kindred — 
his wife — disabled limbs — present attempts at agriculture — 
ancient hunting feats — his wife — his present attempts at 
agriculture — his disabled limbs. Here it is apparent that 
there is no control over the details, no attempt to group 
them at all; the mind of the poet circles round and round 
among them — advancing a little in the process, to be sure, 
but not in the fashion of a well disciphned intellect. It will 
also be seen that in the nature of the case there is nothing 
to produce his apparent helplessness — no difficulty in the 
simple facts, no passion to disorganize the mind. It was 
simply a bad habit into which his attempt to imitate the 
methods of untrained speakers had led him. This he 
himself later realized. After numerous and perplexing 
changes, the poem assumed its present form, in which 'the 
traits and evidences of Simon's early vigour are concentred 
within stanzas I-III, while those of his sad decline are 
brought together in stanzas IV- VI I, the contrast being 
marked by the phrase, "But oh, the heavy change !" '^ ; and 
a reasonable order is substituted for the chaos of the first 
edition. 

Similar changes were introduced into The Thorn. Of 
course in this poem there is more reason for the repetition, 
because the writer is speaking in the character of a talkative 
old seaman, whose mind is overwhelmed by a terrible, tragic 
story. But even here Wordsworth later saw that he had 
gone too far, and omitted several wholly unnecessary and 
repetitious stanzas, without altering the impression which 
he wished to convey. As they stand in the Oxford edi- 
tion, Simon Lee and The Thorn are perhaps more really 
typical of Wordsworth's best art in 1798 than they were 
in the form which they first assumed. He has pruned the 
excrescences without destroying the essential character. 

But a still better criticism of the style of the Lyrical 
Ballads is to be found in the second volume of poems added 

'^Lyrical Ballads, ed. Hutchinson, note on Simon Lee. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 175 

to the Lyrical Ballads in 1800 — the 'Other Poems' men- 
tioned in the title. In the Preface the phrase 'language of 
conversation in the lower and middle classes of society/ 
has become the 'real language of men in a state of vivid 
sensation/ And this more general application corresponds 
to a distinct change in the style. It has become the real 
language of men — of a typical man speaking — and not the 
language of a class. The peculiarities noted in the earlier 
poems have for the most part entirely disappeared. For 
the repetition, the uneducated syntax, the extremely bald 
vocabulary of the first ballads, there has been substituted 
the tone of cultivated conversation, easy, flexible, straight- 
forward, controlling the passion and the details, not con- 
trolled by them. The medium of communication between 
the poet and the reader is no longer the rustic, or a modern 
imitation of an ancient minstrel; it is a quiet, intelligent, 
sympathetic observer, who passes on what he has seen to 
an equally intelligent and sympathetic reader, in language 
unadorned, but perfectly adequate. 

This conversational tone, with its self-control, and its 
unconstrained and progressive structure of the sentences 
and paragraphs, may be illustrated by endless comparisons. 
The extremes of the two styles may be seen in the first 
stanza of The Thorn, already quoted, as compared with 
the beginning of Michael: 

If from the public way you turn your steps 
Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Gill, 
You will suppose that with an upright path 
Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent 
The pastoral Mountains front you, face to face. 
But, courage! for beside that boisterous Brook 
The mountains have all open'd out themselves. 
And made a hidden valley of their own. 
No habitation there is seen ; but such 
As journey thither find themselves alone 
With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites 
That overhead are sailing in the sky. 



176 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Here, despite a few polysyllabic words, like tumultuous, 
habitation, etc., the vocabulary is not essentially changed; 
but how different is what Coleridge calls the ordonnance 
of the style — the various and expressive syntax! In the 
first stanza of The Thorn there are practically no conjunc- 
tions; no type of sentence is employed save the simplest 
independent clauses set side by side. Where subordination 
and relation are implied, they are not expressed, as in the 

lines,^ 

it looks so old, 
In truth you'd find it hard to say 
How it could ever have been young, 
It looks so old and gray, 

where the prose expression would be : It looks so old and 
gray that in truth you would find it hard to tell how it 
could ever have been young/ The omission of the con- 
jtmction that, and the repetition of 'it looks so old and 
gray,' give the characteristic eddying movement to the 
verse, and a certain helplessness to the syntax. But in 
Michael there is no such difficulty. All the necessary con- 
necting tissue of conjunctions and demonstratives is here; 
and there is a steady onward movement, with no repetition, 
no picking up of dropped stitches — so to speak. The poet 
still 'talks' to the reader; there is the tone, the manner, 
of spoken language in the use of the second person, and 
in such an expression as 'But courage !' etc. ; but the 
speaker is no longer an excited rustic who finds his lan- 
guage slightly inadequate to the occasion, and cannot 
keep everything in his mind at once. He is the spectator 
ab extra, calmly though sympathetically holding all the^ 
details in his mind in their proper relation to each other, 
and setting them before the hearer steadily, and without 
haste. 

A similar improvement in the character of the more 
lyrical style is to be discovered in the beautiful fragment, 

^ The Thorn 1-4. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 177 

The Danish Boy, which employs a stanza almost exactly 
like that of The Thorn, and makes a similar attempt to give 
a romantic association to a particular spot by connecting it 
with a half visionary figure : 

Between two sister moorland rills 

There is a spot that seems to lie 

Sacred to flowerets of the hills, 

And sacred to the sky. 

And in this smooth and open dell 

There is a tempest-stricken tree ; 

A corner-stone by lightning cut, 

The last stone of a cottage-hut ; 

And in this dell you see 

A thing no storm can e'er destroy, 

The shadow of a Danish Boy/ 

But this does not mean that Wordsworth has abandoned 
his first attempt to make syntax follow more accurately the 
movement of thought. He has merely learned that the effect 
of extemporaneous speech may be conveyed without an 
absolutely literal imitation of all its repetitions and inepti- 
tudes. In The Brothers, for instance, the characteristics of 
the syntax of the Lyrical Ballads are retained, with further 
improvements and variations; but at the same time there 
is greater skill in the arrangement of details, and a real dis- 
tinction of style. 

The opening is a model of exposition : 

These Tourists, Heaven preserve us ! needs must live 

A profitable life: some glance along 

Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air, 

And they were butterflies to wheel about 

Long as their summer lasted ; some, as wise 

Upon the forehead of a jutting crag 

Sit perch'd with book and pencil on their knee, 

And look and scribble, scribble on and look, 

Until a man might travel twelve stout miles, 

Or reap an acre of his neighbor's corn. 

But, for that moping son of Idleness 

Why can he tarry yonder? 

^ The Danish Boy i-ii. 



178 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Here the method of procedure from the general to the 
particular could hardly be bettered. There is the statement 
concerning the character of tourists in general ; the division 
of the genus into species; and then the reference to the 
particular individual who stands by himself. The sentence- 
structure, too, is varied and flexible; yet the tone of con- 
versation is maintained throughout, and the vocabulary is 
strictly the vocabulary of ordinary speech. Of course, 
when the old vicar begins to tell his story, he falls into 
the peculiarities of speech which we are wont to call 
ungrammatical ; but the progressive movement is not lost. 
The expressiveness of the deviations from standard syntax, 
marked by italics, will be noticed at once, as well as a fine 
antique quality in the language, which reminded Lamb of 
Shakespeare : 

That's Walter Ewbank. 

He had as white a head and fresh a cheek 

As ever were produc'd by youth and age 

Engendering in the blood of hale fourscore. 

For five long generations had the heart 

Of Walter's forefathers o'erflow'd the bounds 

Of their inheritance, that single cottage, 

You see it yonder, and those few green fields. 

They toil'd and wrought, and still, from sire to son. 

Each struggled, and each yielded as before 

A little— yet a little— and old Walter, 

They left to him the family heart, and land 

With other burthens than the crop it bore. 

Year after year the old man still preserv'd 

A chearful mind, and buffeted with bond. 

Interest and mortgages; at last he sank. 

And went into his grave before his time. 

Poor Walter! whether it was care that spurr'd him 

God only knows, but to the very last. 

He had the lightest foot in Ennerdale.^ 

As The Brothers is the best example of the real language 
of men attempted in the volume of 1798, so Ruth is a 

^ The Brothers 200-219, 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS 1 79 

happier example of the use of the mannerisms adopted from 
the ballads than anything in the first edition. Here all the 
old tricks reappear; but they have become minor elements 
in a far more elaborate and finished technique. 

For the original simplicity of syntax there is substituted a 
structure more complex and sustained. Now and then, to 
be sure, Wordsworth retains the method of simply setting 
more or less naturally related facts side by side, in the form 
of independent statements, without an attempt to show their 
natural relations, as in the stanza. 

There came a Youth from Georgia's shore, 

A military Casque he wore 

With splendid feathers drest; 

He brought them from the Cherokees ; 

The feathers nodded in the breeze 

And made a gallant crest,^ 

where the relations of thought to thought might be 
expressed in somewhat this fashion — 'There came a youth 
from Georgia's shore, who wore a military casque dressed 
with splendid feathers, which he brought from the 
Cherokees. These feathers nodded in the breeze.' But for 
the most part there is sufficient connecting tissue, and the 
light and shade and emphasis are furnished by proper sub- 
ordination. When this is lacking, the reader, perceiving 
how well the poet knows his trade, is inclined to think that 
there is some reason for the omission — a peculiar emphasis 
to be gained thereby. But for one stanza of this type there 
are a dozen in which all the resources of elaborate and varied 
syntax seem to be at the writer's command. The greater 
part of Ruth is a model of perspicuous sentence-structure. 
Moreover, the various narrative-tags are no longer obtru- 
sive, though they still occur : 

^ Ruth 12-18. (The references are to the first version of Ruth, in 
the Lyrical Ballads of 1800.) 



i8o Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

But, as you have before been told 
This Stripling, sportive, gay and bold, 

Had roamed about with vagrant bands 
Of Indians in the west^ 

Even so they did ; and / may say 
That to sweet Ruth that happy day 
Was more than human life.^ 

A Barn her winter bed supplies. 

But till the warmth of summer skies 

And summer days is gone, 

(And in this tale we all agree) 

She sleeps beneath the greenwood tree. 

And other home hath none.® 

They are merged in the general excellence of the style, 
and seem a natural part of it. 

Again, there is something peculiarly effective in the 
occasional use of the ballad-repetition, 

Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned, 
A young and happy child,* 

and the naive, ballad-like, ending is very beautiful : 

Farewel ! and when thy days are told 

Ill-fated Ruth! in hallowed mould 

Thy corpse shall buried be. 

For thee a funeral bell shall ring, 

And all the congregation sing 

A Christian psalm for thee.^ 

'^ Ruth 109-110, 1 13-14. 

^ Ihid. 100-102. 

^ Ibid. 199-204. 

*Ibid. 221-222. Cf. The Child of Elle 169-170: 

Fair Emmeline sighed, fair Emmeline wept, 
And all did trembling stand. 

' Ibid. 223-228. 



THE LYRICAL BALLADS l8l 

Hence, as early as 1800, Wordsworth was already out- 
growing the Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads, and with 
it the experimental period of his career. Some traces of 
the original theory of course remain, both in the hard 
bits of literal, matter-of-fact statement in poems like Alice 
Fell, and in his occasional defense of so-called 'prosaic' 
language. Certainly the original theory continued to inter- 
est him until about 1805, the last reprinting of the Lyrical 
Ballads of 1800 with their preface. But for the real source 
of his poetic diction henceforth we must look mainly to 
his reading. In the volumes of 1807 the influence of 
Spenser and 'of the Elizabethan library furnished by Lamb 
is everywhere evident, especially the pure and quiet 
cadences of the later Elizabethans, Daniel, Drayton, and 
Beaum.ont. The sonnets, which form so numerous and so 
beautiful a part of his poetry after 1800, were written under 
the immediate influence of Milton. The noble and unique 
language of the Prelude is created out of the apparently 
unpromising terminology of the philosophers, Hartley and 
Darwin. No doubt the eloquent discourses of Coleridge 
served as an intermediary step in this alchemic transmuta- 
tion. The poetry of 1814-1816 was influenced by the 
re-reading of Virgil and other Latin authors. There is a 
pensive Virgilian graciousness of language in some of his 
too much neglected later poems, such as the Egyptian Maid. 
The language of the later poems also reflects the stiff, but 
often deeply pathetic, Latin of early ecclesiastical litera- 
ture. From sources like these, not from the speech of the 
dalesmen, was the greater part of Wordsworth's phrase- 
ology ultimately derived. 

But, after all, it was the theory suggested in the Adver- 
tisement which taught Wordsworth to make this use of 
books. Through his apparent repudiation of the language 
of books he entered into his literary inheritance. His 
theory of poetic diction served as a test by which he might 
seek out the genuine metal of poetry, and appropriate it 



1 82 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

to himself. He had already shown a disposition to test 
and appropriate in his use of borrowed phrases in the 
Descriptive Sketches. But the touchstone, while good as 
far as it went, had not been sufficient. He had learned to 
judge natural imagery used in poetry in accordance with 
his own experience, and to include in his own work the 
expressions which satisfied him. But he had not learned 
to judge of language and the psychology of human expres- 
sion. He merely took what pleased him, and what pleased 
him was the strange, the original, the fantastic. He had 
no social consciousness — no knowledge of the way in which 
others might react to the words that he used. The theory 
of the Lyrical Ballads awakened in him this social con- 
sciousness. He wished to learn how living men spoke, how 
they had always spoken. He learned to test his language 
in accordance both with general usage and with actual psy- 
chology. This gave him a control over the resources of 
his own tongue such as only the scholarly poets may have. 
After 1798 it is almost impossible to catch Wordsworth in 
a questionable use of a word or a slip of grammar. His 
vocabulary has a purity and precision which neither Milton 
nor Tennyson, the self-conscious artists in language, can 
equal — however they may surpass him in splendor and 
sonorous music. His sentence-structure is remarkable alike 
for its peculiar flexibility and for its strict observance of 
grammar and idiom. He continues to read more and more 
in the field of English literature, but with discrimination; 
at any moment he is ready to give an account of the literary 
faith that is in him. He had rediscovered the principles of 
English poetry, and in so doing had discovered himself. 
It is in this discovery, not in any experimental imitation 
of the speech of Tom, Dick, or Harry, that the true sig- 
nificance of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction lies. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following bibliography contains onty the titles of books to which 
a specific reference is made in the text : 

Addison, Joseph. Criticisms of Paradise Lost (ed. Cook). Boston, 1892. 

Bagehot, Walter. Literary Studies. London, 1879. 

Blair, Hugh. Essays on Rhetoric. London, 1787. 

Bowles, William L. Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots, 

during a Tour. Bath, 1789. 
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Oratore (ed. Wilkins). Oxford, 1879-92. 
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Oratory and Orators (tr. Watson). London, 

1889. • 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Epistolaris (ed. Turnbull). 

London, 1911. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria (ed. Shawcross). 

Oxford, 1907. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Complete Poetical Works (ed. E. H. 

Coleridge). Oxford, 1912. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Letters (ed. E. H. Coleridge). Boston, 

1895. 
Coleridge, Sara. Memoir and Letters (ed. by her daughter). New 

York, 1874. 
Cook, Albert S. The Art of Poetry. Boston, 1892. 
Cooper, Lane. A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth. 

London, 191 1. 
CowPER, William. Works (ed. Southey). London, 1836-37. 
Darwin, Erasmus. Zoonomia. London, 1801. 
Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden. London, 1791. 
Dennis, John. The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry. London, 1704. 
De Vere, Aubrey. Essays, chiefly on Poetry. London, 1887. 
De Vere, Aubrey. Essays, chiefly Literary and Ethical. London, 1889. 
Dryden, John. Essays (ed. Ker). Oxford, 1900. 

Dryden, John. Works (ed. Scott-Saintsbury). Edinburgh, 1882-93. 
Goldsmith, Oliver. Works (ed. Gibbs). London, 1885. 
Gray, Thomas. Letters (ed. Tovey). London, 1900. 
Hamelius, Paul. Die Kritik in der Englischen Literatur des 17. und 18. 

Jahrhunderts. Leipzig, 1897. 
Harper, George MacLean. William Wordsworth. New York, 1916. 
Hartley, David. Observations on Man. London, 1810. 



184 Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction 

Hazlitt, William. Literary Remains. London, 1836. 

Horace Quintus Flaccus. Ars Poetica. (Art of Poetry, ed. Cook.) 

Boston, 1892. 
HuTTON, Richard Holt. Essays, Theological and Literary. London, 

1888. 
Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the English Poets (ed. Hill). Oxford, 

1905. 
JoNSON, Ben. Timber (ed. Shelling). Boston, 1892. 
Kellner, Leon. Historical Outlines of English Syntax. London and 

New York, 1892. 
Petit de Julleville. Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature Frangaise 

des Origines a 1900. Paris, 1897. 
Lamb, Charles. Works (ed. Lucas). London, 1903-1905. 
Lamb, Charles. Letters (ed. Macdonald). London, 1903. 
Legouis, Emile. The Early Life of William Wordsworth. New York, 

1897. 
Lieneman, Kurt. Die Belesenheit von William Wordsworth. Weimar, 

1908. 

Lucas, E. V. The Life of Charles Lamb. New York and London, 1905. 

MooRE, J. L. Tudor-Stuart Views on the Growth, Status, and Destiny 
of the English Language. Halle, 1910. 

Pope, Alexander. Works (ed. Courthope and Elwin). London, 1871-89. 

Pratt, Alice E. The Use of Color in the Verse of the English Romantic 
Poets. Chicago, 1898. 

QuiNTiLiAN, Marcus Fabius. Institutes of Oratory (tr. Watson). Lon- 
don, 1891-92. 

Reynolds, Myra. The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between 
Pope and Wordsworth. Chicago, 1896. 

Robinson, Henry Crabb. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence 
(ed. Sadler). Boston, 1869. 

Scott, John. Critical Essays on Some of the Poems of Several English 
Poets. London, 1785. 

Shairp, John C. Aspects of Poetry. Boston and New York, 1892. 

Smith, G. Gregory, Elizabethan Critical Essays. Oxford, 1904. 

Spence, Joseph. Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and 
Men. London, 1820. 

Spingarn, Joel E. Critical Essays of the Sevententh Century. Oxford, 
1908. 

Warton, Joseph. An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope. Lon- 
don, 1782. 

Wordsworth, Christopher. Memoirs of William Wordsworth (ed. 
Reed). Boston, 1851. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 1 85 

Wordsworth, Christopher. Social Life at the English Universities in 
the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1874. 

Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. Bristol, 1798. (In the pos- 
session of Mrs. Cynthia Morgan St. John.) 

Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. London, 1798. 

Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads (ed. Hutchinson). London, 
1798. 

Wordsworth, William, Lyrical Ballads, with other Poems. London, 
1800. 

Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other 
Poems. London, 1802. 

Wordsworth, William, Lyrical Ballads. Philadelphia, 1802. 

Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other 
Poems. London, 1805. 

Wordsworth, William. Poems. London, 1807. 

Wordsworth, William. Poems including Lyrical Ballads and the Mis- 
cellaneous Pieces of the Author, with additional Poems, a new 
Preface and a Supplementary Essay. London, 1815. 

Wordsworth, William. Miscellaneous Poems. London, 1820. 

Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. London, 1827. 

Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. London, 1836. 

Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. London, 1840-1. 

Wordsworth, William. Poems. London, 1845. 

Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works (ed. Knight), including a Life 
of Wordsworth. Edinburgh, 1882-89. 

Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works (ed. Dowden) with Memoir. 
London, 1892-93. 

Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works (ed. Hutchinson). London, 
New York, 1907. 

Prose Writings of Wordsworth (ed. Knight). London, 1893. 

Letters of the Wordsworth Family from 1787 to 1855 (ed. Knight). 
Boston and London, 1907. 

Wordsworth's Prefaces and Essays on Poetry (ed. A. J. George). 
Boston, 1892. 

Wordsworth's Literary Criticism (ed. Nowell C. Smith). London, 1905. 

Wordsworth, William. Poems and Extracts Chosen by William 
Wordsworth for an Album presented to Lady Mary Lowther, Christ- 
mas, 1819. London, 1905. 

A Description of the Wordsworth and Coleridge Manuscripts in the 
possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman (ed. W. Hale White). Lon- 
don and New York, 1897. 

Transactions of the Wordsworth Society. Edinburgh, 1882-87. 



INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 



Addison, i6, 39, 57, 58, 59, 61. 
Alfred, 152. 
Ariosto, 17, III. 
Aristotle, 7, 23, 58, 59, 129. 
Arnold, Matthew, vii, 2, 6. 
Ascham, 6, 7, 9. 

Bagehot, xi, 2. 

Beattie, 93. 

Beaumont, John, 181. 

Beaupuy, iii. 

Bembo, 17. 

Bernard of Clairveaux, 36. 

Blair, 49. 

Boileau, 22, 33, 34, 35, 55. 

Boyer, 113. 

Bowles, 85, 87, 88, 99, 114, 118, 119, 

125. 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 15, 22. 
Burns, 3, 61, 94, 118, 119. 
Biirger, 122, 123, 124. 
Byron, 14. 

Caesar, 7. 

Campion, 15. 

Catullus, 113. 

Charles II, 4. 

Chaucer, 2, 4, 10, 43, 112, 117, 139, 
140, 144, 145, 148, 152. 

Cheke, Sir John, 7. 

Cicero, 7, 9, 11, 12, 113. 

Coleridge, vii, viii, ix, x, xiv, 3, 4, 
7, 13, 14, 16, 39, 52, 53, 62, 66, 67, 
68, 85, 86, 99, 102, 104, 107, 108, 
109, no, 112, 1 13-140, 141, 144, 
148, 151, 152, 162, 169, 176, 181. 

Coleridge, Sara, xiv. 

Collins, (i2,, 85, 87, 100, 115. 

Cooper, Lane, xi. 

Corneille, 2.2,. 

Cowley, 7, 16, 53. 

Cowper, 3, 36, 39, 57, 61, 62, 88, 92, 
94, 118. 

Daniel, Samuel, 13, 15, 181. 
Dante, 2. 



Darwin, Erasmus, 102, 114, 115, 116, 
118, 130, 181. 

Delille, 93. 

Demosthenes, 113. 

Denham, 23. 

Dennis, John, 52, 129. 

DeQuincey, xiv. 

DeVere, Aubrey, xi, xiv. 

Donne, 7, 16. 

Dowden, xi. 

Drayton, 13, 14, 15, 181. 

Dryden, xiv, 4, 6, 11, 13, 21-24, 26, 
28-35, 39, 41, 42-45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 
54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 74, 100, 112, 129. 

Dyer, 63, 87, 99. 

E. K., 5. 

Elyot, Sir Thomas, 6. 

Gardiner, Bishop, 6. 

Gascoigne, 8, 20. 

Gay, 40. 

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 5. 

Goldsmith, 3, 38, 54, 57, 58, 61. 

Gray, 3, 54, 57, 60, 62, 92, 93, 100, 

115. 
Gunston, 46. 

Hamilton, William Rowan, 107. 

Harper, William M., xi. 

Hartley, 130, 136, 181. 

Harvey, Gabriel, 6, 7, 8, 15. 

Hazlitt, xiv. 

Henry VIII, 162. 

Home, 93. 

Homer, 19, 113, 117. 

Horace, 8, 9, 11, 22>, 28, 36, 112, 117, 

129. 
Hutchinson, Thomas, xi, 144. 
Hutton, R. H., xi. 

Jeffrey, 90. 

Johnson, Samuel, 11, 23, 30, 31, 44, 

54, 58, 60, 66, 123, 133. 
Jonson, Ben, 13, 14, 16, 21, 22, 25. 
Julleville, Petit de, 22, 2^. 



INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 



187 



Juvenal, 112. 

Keats, 86, 105. 
Kellner, 152, 156. 
Klopstock, 123. 
Knight, 78, 80. 

LaBruyere, 55. 

Lamb, vii, viii, x, xiv, T^-, II3, 118, 

119, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 

181. 
Landon, xiv. 
Langhorne, 94. 
Legouis, xi, 64, 65, ^(i, 77, 83, 84, 93, 

95, 98, 102, 109. 
Lloyd, 125. 
Longinus, 52, 129. 
Lucretius, 62, 113. 

Malherbe, 22, 22,, 26, 27, 30, 23- 

Matthews, 108, 112. 

Milton, 4, 16-18, 10, 24, ^2, 49, 58, 

59, 60, 62, 63, 71, 87, 91, 92, 93, 96, 
97, 98. 99, 100, III, 114, 116, 117, 
181, 182. 

Nash, 8. 

Ovid, 113, 117. 

Parnell, 61. 

Pater, 129. 

Percy, 122, 123, 124. 

Philips, Ambrose, 47. 

Pleiade, 23. 

Pope, 15, 22, 24, 26, 32-40, 49-57, 58, 

60, 61, 72, 87, 88, 93, 114, 115, 118, 
129. 

Pratt, Alice, 105. 
Prior, 40. 
Puttenham, 10, 11, 20. 

Quintilian, 9, 11. 

Rogers, Samuel, 94. 
Ronsard, 23. 
Rosset, 93. 



Seward, 118. 

Scott, John, 57, 109. 

Scott, Walter, xiv, 14, 42. 

Shairp, xi. 

Shakespeare, 4, 17, 19, 22, 32, 60, 71, 

93, 99, III, 114, 115, 116, 126, 150, 

178. 
Shelley, 129. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 

15, 21. 
Skeat, 144. 
Smollett, 93. 
Sophocles, 19. 

Southey, xiv, 118, 119, 120, 125. 
Spence, 27- 
Spenser, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 17, 19, 

58, 61, 71, 93, 99, no, III, 181. 
Spinoza, 130. 
Sprat, 27. 
Steele, 52. 
Swift, 39, 40, 51, 53. 

Tasso, III. 

Taylor, William, 122, 123. 
Tennyson, 182. 
Terence, 9, 113. 
Thelwell, 119, 122. 
Theocritus, 103, 117. 
Thomson, 55-57, 93. 99- 

Virgil, 43, 53, 113, 117, 181. 

Waller, 16, 23, 26, 34, 45, 47, 49. 
Warton, Joseph, 38, 53, 55-57, 62, 

85, 87, 92, 114. 
Walsh, zz. 
Watts, 46. 
Wilson, 10. 

Winchelsea, Lady, 88, 93. 
Wolsely, Robert, 28. 
Wordsworth, Christopher, 106, 107, 

168. 
Wordsworth. Dorothy, 106, 107. 
Wrangham, 112. 

Young, 93, 99. 



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111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 
(724)779-2111 



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